ABSTRACT

Title of dissertation: OUR LADIES: THIRD SPACE IDENTITIES

IN CHICANA ARTISTIC EXPRESSIONS,

1970-2000

Hilkka Marja Booker, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013

Dissertation directed by: Dr. Ana Patricia Rodriguez

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

This dissertation examines Chicana feminist artistic expression in literature and in

the visual arts produced between 1970 and 2000, when intense questioning of Chicana

identity politics and border subjectivities emerged in both literature and the arts. Chicana

feminists explored problems of the subordination of women, both in mainstream U.S.

discourse and within the Chicano Movement, which had hitherto focused on masculine

strategies of self-definition in the attempt to shape a communal Latino identity. The works

studied include the poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes (Emplumada 1981), Alma Villanueva

(Bloodroot 1982), and Pat Mora (Borders 1986); the photographic autobiography of

Norma Cantú (Canícula 2001); and visual art by Ester Hernández (La Virgen de

Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los Xicanos 1975), Yolanda Lopez (Guadalupe

series 1978), and Alma Lopez (Our Lady 1999).

Utilizing Gloria Anzaldúa’s notions about mestiza consciousness and Cherríe

Moraga’s “theory in the flesh,” I explore Chicana creative works and examine the

development of multiple subjectivities that are a product of Borderlands thinking,

mediated by Chicana everyday experiences. Theories of location, such as Edward Soja’s

Third Space provide a framework for my study. Moreover, I theorize that in these works

the female body becomes an important site of contestation for the sexist and masculinist

practices of the Chicano Movement and the oppressive conditions of dominant culture.

OUR LADIES: THIRD SPACE IDENTITIES IN CHICANA ARTISTIC EXPRESSION,

1970-2000

by

Hilkka Marja Booker

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School

of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

2013

Advisory Committee:

Dr. Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Chair

Dr. Sandra Cypess

Dr. Eyda Merediz

Dr. Randy Ontiveros

Dr. Seung-Kyung Kim

© Copyright by

Hilkka Marja Booker

2013

ii

Dedication

In memory of my children Kirsi

and Kari who crossed over to the

other side during the years I was

working on this project, to my

sister Minna who beat the odds

so many times, and to Roger, Erik, and

Annika for being there.

iii

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those professors at the University of Maryland who

taught me over the years, helping me to develop themes related to this dissertation, and

bring it to conclusion, especially: Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Sandra Cypess, Eyda

Merediz, Randy Ontiveros, Seung-Kyung Kim, José Emilio Pacheco, Virginia Bouvier,

Roberta Levine, Phyllis Peres, and Merle Collins. I am also grateful for the

companionship of so many talented students who enriched my studies through

conversation and exchange of ideas. A special thank you to Victoria Elliott and Angelo

Gómez for helping me with the final steps of this project.

iv

Table of Contents

Dedication ........................................................................................................................ ii

Acknowledgments ...........................................................................................................iii

Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ iv

List of Figures .................................................................................................................. v

Chapter 1: Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1

Chicano Struggle for Self-Determination............................................... ……….16

Migration and Questions of Identity ................................................................... 21

Theoretical and Methodological Considerations ................................................. 25

Master's Tools………………….…….………………………….………………32

Notes ................................................................................................................. 44

Chapter 2: Poetic Voices and Chicana Identity ............................................................... 47

Alma Villanueva ................................................................................................ 53

Lorna Dee Cervantes .......................................................................................... 66

Pat Mora ............................................................................................................ 79

Notes ................................................................................................................. 94

Chapter 3: Chicana Visions Here and Beyond: Our Lady ............................................... 96

Arts and Chicana Empowerment ........................................................................ 97

Tracing History from Aztlán to the Virgin of Guadalupe .................................... 99

Chicana Artists, Chicana Subjects .................................................................... 110

Lifting the Veil of(f) the Virgin: Ester Hernández and Yolanda Lopez ............. 114

Alma Lopez and her Queer Virgin .................................................................... 127

Notes ............................................................................................................... 137

Chapter 4: Fictions of Autobiography and Fictitious Family Photographs .................... 139

Fluid Borders of Language ............................................................................... 152

Crossings ......................................................................................................... 154

Borderlands and Moving Away from the Assimilation Trap……….………….156

What Is It about the Place? .............................................................................. 160

The Embodied Subject of Herstory................................................................... 164

Notes ............................................................................................................... 176

Chapter 5: Conclusions ............................................................................................... 178

Notes ............................................................................................................... 190

Appendix ..................................................................................................................... 191

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………................ 197

v

List of Figures

Figure 1. Traditional image of the Virgin of Guadalupe………………………..……..191

Figure 2. Ester Hernández. The Virgin of Guadalupe Defending the Rights of Chicanos

…………………………………………………………………………………......................192

Figure 3. Yolanda Lopez. Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe…………......193

Figure 4. Yolanda Lopez.Victoria F. Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe…………….....194

Figure 5: Yolanda Lopez. Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe…..……... 195

Figure 6. Alma Lopez. Our Lady…………………………………………………………...…196

1

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

I want to explore the various selves that I am, and I decided on a escondidas

1

because of much who I am has been unfolding of who and what I was all along

a escondidas, hidden so deep inside that not even I knew who or what I was.

Norma Élia Cantú, “A Escondidas”

The epigraph above, from a text written by Norma Élia Cantú, speaks to the

complexity of identity formation, and her long search for the hidden aspects of herself,

stretching back to her childhood. While she questions whether she is a Chicana feminist

teacher who writes, or a Chicana feminist writer who teaches, her quest to understand

who she is and her strenuous effort to uncover all facets of her persona have been a

common theme in Chicana writing and art work. Cantú explains that the “Chicana”

became an ethnic marker for her after she was introduced as “Spanish” at a training

session for teachers. To her, Chicana expressed ethnic heritage, ideology and identity (A

Escondidas 124). Misclassifying the Latina other by calling her “Spanish” also shows

the kind of pitfalls that members of the U.S. dominant culture can encounter in their

misguided effort to appear culturally sensitive. The facilitator of the training session was

describing Cantú as “Spanish” in an attempt not to insult her by characterizing her as

Mexican (124). The exchange took place at a school function with educators, but it is a

typical example of the racist and discriminatory attitudes towards Mexican Americans

that prevailed during the period in the 1970s that Cantú describes, something that persists

even today. To the well-meaning school administrator, it was preferable to address Cantú

2

as “Spanish” rather than as the less desirable category of Mexican. Such attitudes

towards Chicanas/os, in the context of U.S. ideals of cultural assimilation, have often

resulted in the repression of a people’s true history and subjectivities, which then remain

a escondidas. This dissertation, in which I will explore creative texts produced by

Chicanas, owes much to my work with Latin American trauma survivors. Although their

bodies and psyches were scarred by violence, they taught me the value of art and poetry

during their healing process, as they started to recover the self, lost to years of abuse and

masculine control. One of the activities I participated in with Latina survivors was to

stitch together a quilt made of individual patches that were symbolic of each person’s

journey to wholeness. In the end, the quilt was full of references to the survivors’

experiences of violence, their memories of their home countries, and their hopes for the

future. Each of these often mismatched identity indicators created a meaningful whole

that revealed much about the lived experience of each Latina woman and of the women

as a collective. It was this that sparked my interest in the development of both cultural

tropes and female identity.

My focus in this dissertation will be on the construction and representation of

female subjectivity in contemporary Chicana literature and artistic production. I will

examine the poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes (Emplumada 1981), Alma Villanueva

(Bloodroot 1982), and Pat Mora (Borders 1986); the photographic autobiography of

Norma Cantú (Canícula 2001); and visual art by Ester Hernández (La Virgen de

Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los Xicanos 1975), Yolanda Lopez (Guadalupe

series 1978), and Alma Lopez (Our Lady 1999). The selection includes texts primarily

from the 1980s and 1990s that hark back to a renaissance in U.S. Latino literature, when

3

diverse literary representations, including identity issues, were extensively explored. In

this period, Chicana writers were focusing on an examination of the problems of the

subordination of women, both in mainstream U.S. discourse and within the Chicano

Movement. This movement had hitherto focused on masculine strategies of self-

definition in an attempt to shape a communal Latino identity (Mujcinovic 2).2

The

dissertation will examine Chicana feminist artistic expression in literature and in the

visual arts between 1970 and 2000, when intense questioning of Chicana identity politics

and border subjectivities emerged in both literature and the arts. Utilizing Gloria

Anzaldúa’s notions about mestiza consciousness and Cherríe Moraga’s “theory in the

flesh,” I propose that the Chicana creative works studied in this dissertation show

development of the multiple subjectivities that are a product of Borderlands thinking,

mediated by Chicana everyday experiences. Theories of location, such as Edward Soja’s

Third Space, provide a framework for my study. Moreover, I theorize that in these works

the female body becomes an important site of contestation for the sexist and masculinist

practices of the Chicano Movement, and the oppressive conditions of the dominant

culture.

While their male counterparts claimed Aztlán as a Chicano home base

foundational to their identity, Chicana writers and artists instead explored the space of

interpersonal relations, re-interpreting old motifs, such as La Llorona and La Malinche

from a womanist perspective. One of the most significant Chicana accomplishments was

the recovery of the female subject both as an embodied person and as a cultural/societal

agent (Davis-Undiano 130). This led Chicana feminists of color to develop “theories of

the flesh” that focused critical attention on the physical realities of Chicana lives, such as

4

skin color, sexual orientation, and the body as a basis for a new politic “born out of

necessity” (Moraga, This Bridge 24). In art the emphasis was not on the exile’s desire to

return home to the nationalistic and masculinist land of origin envisioned by the Chicano

Movement in the 1970s, but the making of a more bodily connection to place. As Alicia

Gaspar de Alba theorizes, Chicana artists produced an embodied aesthetic in which they

themselves became their place of origin, and their bodies signifiers of place (127). This

can be seen in the many visual images that depict the Virgin of Guadalupe as a present-

day working woman, removing her from her traditional place in Catholic dogma and

bringing her closer to the lived experiences and preoccupations of Chicanas.3

In practice,

then, Chicana feminist scholarship developed theories of the body by focusing on the

experiences of women of color, as well as on issues of class and race. Hence, in the wake

of the Chicano Movement, Chicana scholars, writers, and visual artists like Yolanda

Lopez brought to the foreground notions about “brown bodies” and female border

subjectivities.

As indicated above, this dissertation will analyze poetry, art, photographs, and an

autobiographical text, in which border crossings and (creative) spaces in the interstices of

official cultural and geographic boundaries open up possibilities for the formation of

multiple subjectivities. Such works give a voice to the formerly silenced female persona,

resist traditional patriarchal discourse, and seek alternative forms of expression. My goal

is to examine different genres and to use theories that interrogate and promote dialogue

with one another and that add an-Other snapshot to the growing body of criticism in

Chicana/o studies. As Debra Castillo writes in Border Women: Writing from la Frontera,

theorization about the border cannot be consolidated into a singular hegemonic structure,

5

but fragmentary retakes and discontinuous snapshots may offer the best hope for more

grounded and polyphonic theories of the border. In studying female subjectivities from a

perspective that allows theorization from a multidimensional spatial construct, the

consideration of lived experience and the political positioning of the subject are of

fundamental importance. Edward Said commented in Orientalism that ideological,

political and institutional constraints have an impact on the author, and we can better

understand culture when we see these constraints as productive (13).

As I am studying different genres and time periods in texts by authors who have

acquired critical acclaim but also attracted heated criticism, my project aims to answer

several questions: How are Chicana subjectivities manifested in the creative works

studied? What contribution have the authors made in their respective fields of art in

bringing forth problems of Chicana women? What Chicana voices do their works give

expression to? How have the authors resisted the patriarchal discourse and created new

images of women that cross borders of gender, sexuality, race, and economic status?

What does the Borderlands trope and concept of spaces in-between add to the notions

about female subjectivities? What techniques do the authors use to represent life on the

border and give expression to these subjectivities? What is the significance of the

liberation of the female body and theories in the flesh for the larger Chicana feminist

project? My methodology involves thematic analysis of the works of Villanueva,

Cervantes, Mora, Hernández, Lopez, and Cantú. I utilize a feminist framework within a

socio-historical context. Finally, I employ theories of the Borderlands, Third Space, and

cultural hybridity that help us understand the development and expression of Chicana

subjectivities, and their relationship to living in-between worlds. The most important of

6

these theories were crafted by Norma Alarcón, Anzaldúa, and Soja. I complement their

notions with the theories of Roland Barthes and Marianne Hirsch about photography.

In the study, I rely heavily on Anzaldúa’s notions about mestiza consciousness.

She characterizes this as the consciousness of the Borderlands, specific to women

(Borderlands 99). As a theoretical construct the Borderlands help to reveal the shifting

subjectivities and plural identifications of Borderlands dwellers. Anzaldúa writes that as

a mestiza she is a product of the multiple cultures that she walks in and out of (99),

drawing from various notions of cultural and racial hybridity. While she strongly

opposes the dominant ideology of racial purity (99), she explains that being of mixed race

produces restlessness (100) and conflict:

In a constant state of mental nepantilism,4

an Aztec word meaning torn

between ways, la mestiza is a product of the transfer of the cultural and

spiritual values of one group to another. Being tricultural, monolingual, or

multilingual, speaking a patois, and in a state of perpetual transition, the

mestiza faces the dilemma of the mixed breed: which collectivity does the

daughter of a darkskinned mother listen to? (Borderlands 100)

Anzaldúa was among the first Chicana theorists to address the issue of multiple

subjectivities. This construct was developed further by Norma Alarcón, who created a

theoretical framework around the construction of a subject-in-process. However, the idea

of multiple subjectivities has been adapted to Chicana studies without significant

questioning. In my project, I broaden the scope by also utilizing notions about lived

experience and identity theories that complement and interrogate each other rather than

relying on one ideology alone. I expect that the project will provoke many complex

7

questions about identity formation: Are the notions of multiple subjectivities applicable in

the same way across different genres? What are the drawbacks of these notions? Is it

possible (or even desirable) to theorize against all essences?

In Latina/o communities, the radical social movements of the 1960s and 1970s

challenged national political and identity paradigms by directing critical attention towards

the south and engaging in a process of border crossing (Torres, “Transnational” 174). In

addition to demanding access to power, Latinos and Chicanos embarked on a search for

the homeland and a definition of group identity, largely constructed as difference from

that of the dominant society (174). On a symbolic level, the Chicano Movement’s claim

to Aztlán as the ancient home of their ancestors served to construct a special “spatial

reality” that decreased the alienation of the population and gave it a sense of having

returned to a home of its own (Davis-Undiano 118). On the other hand, this process

made it necessary to reconcile differences, once it became obvious that Mexico was not

invested in its populations residing in other countries, unless it could gain some political

advantage from it (Torres, “Transnational” 176).5

Consequently, the recognition that one

is “in and out of place in both the home and host country gave rise to the exploration of

border identities” (177) and Borderlands cultures. In addition to the geographical site,

Borderlands thinking or Border gnosis, as Walter Mignolo calls it (11), included notions

of border zones, such as gender, sexual orientation, class, race, and nationality.

According to Renato Rosaldo these are not empty transitional zones but sites of creative

cultural production. This is evinced, for instance, in the work of the authors studied in

this dissertation, when they show how shifting subjectivities emerge in the interstices of

the border experience.6

Moreover, connected to the idea of border zones is the term

8

“people between cultures,” which Rosaldo coined in Culture and Truth. This notion of

being in-between cultures is important to my study, as it opens up a dynamic spatial

imaginary from which to theorize the border experience (198).

The notion of location, in general, provides a useful perspective for a study of

different groups of people and cultural production. Edward Soja has stated that the

spatial dimension has more relevance in today’s praxis and politics than ever before.7

According to Soja, the spatiality of life is equally as important as historicity and sociality

which form a three-dimensional construct that inspires us to revise how we have studied

history and society. This third space is especially interesting to explore, because it

creates a concept that has until recently been ignored. In its ideal form, and unlike other

sites of discipline, the third space is:

instead, an efficient invitation to enter a space of extraordinary openness, a place

of critical exchange where the geographical imagination can be expanded to

encompass a multiplicity of perspectives that have heretofore been considered by

the epistemological referees to be incompatible, un-combinable. It is a space

where issues of race, class, and gender can be addressed simultaneously without

privileging one over the other, where one can be Marxist and post-Marxist,

materialist and idealist, structuralist and humanist, disciplined and trans-

disciplinary at the same time. (Soja 5)

According to Soja, the theory of the “third space” tries to capture what is

constantly moving and changing in the milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and

meanings to restructure the binary notions of Western thinking and to open up new

alternatives (2). Since the purpose of the present study is to investigate the multiple

9

expressions of Chicana identities in literary and artistic production, and to explore how

the proximity of the U.S. Mexican border shapes the construction of the female subject,

theories of location provide a useful foundation because they challenge the Western idea

of an autonomous, unitary (male) subject.

Thus, in my research, theories explaining the development of multiple identities

will complement notions of border. As Anzaldúa notes with insight in her foundational

text, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, the space that a Latina/o person

occupies in the United States is a space in which "the lifeblood of two worlds merge to

form a third country — border culture" (25). The Borderlands she describes is the site of

a continuous transition of those who are culturally and normatively different. It is a site

that often becomes a battlefield, and "a hemorrhage where the third world suffers a

confrontation" with the first world (Ramirez, “El feminismo” 207). Its characteristics

include ambivalence, tensions, and symbolic bleeding. For Latinas/os, it is also a site of

cultural disconnection because

alienated from her mother culture, “alien" in the dominant culture, the

woman of color does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self. Petrified,

she cannot respond, her face caught between los intersticios, the spaces

between the two worlds she inhabits. (Borderlands 42)

This tension, however, not only produces collisions and alienation, but also conditions for

creativity, because from the confrontation and conflict emerges a new hybrid synthesis, a

mixture of languages, customs, cultures, and populations (Ramirez, “El feminismo” 207).

Also, a new way of being and of seeing the world emerges there, as expressed in Chicana

third space culture in the works of Villanueva, Cervantes, Mora, Hernández, Lopez, and

10

Cantú that are examined in this dissertation.

The feminist theoretician bell hooks also echoes the importance of location for a

new cultural ethos, when she writes that the margin is the site of radical openness or

resistance because that is where revolutionary ideology is created, by incorporating the

experiences of the oppressed (hooks, Feminist Theory 161). She emphasizes that the

marginalized need to make theory and direct the action. Like Anzaldúa, she indicates

that the margin is, in reality, a site of risks and danger, but she also believes that it is the

only space from which it is possible to theorize an agenda for a cultural practice

(Yearning 149), mostly because the people who occupy this place have the capacity to see

the world "outside in and inside out" and find new ways to survive: "This sense of

wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our lives, provided us

with an oppositional world view — a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors,

that sustained us .…" (149). This survival strategy, which corresponds to Anzaldúa's

facultad, makes possible the observation of deeper realities and the development of a new

consciousness, which has the potential to restructure the life and the self of the person

(Borderlands 61).

According to hooks, the oppressed population often struggles against forgetting.

In the more recent creative work, remembering is not only about recalling the past but

also about creating spaces where one can “redeem and reclaim the past, legacies of pain,

suffering and triumph in ways to transform present reality” (hooks, Yearning 147). Hooks

says that language is another place of struggle. Borrowing from Adrienne Rich, she

reminds us that a radical voice often speaks in the language of the oppressor. While

speaking this language got hooks through graduate school and job interviews, it was a

11

language that “carries the scent of oppression” (146). Hooks differentiates between the

language that is directed to the oppressor and the struggle of the oppressed in language.

The goal of the latter is not simply to confront domination but to recover one’s self, to

reconcile, to reunite, and to renew (Yearning 146). In this sense, hooks’s ideas mirror

those of the Chicano Movement and Chicana feminist expression.

However, in her criticism of hooks, Analouise Keating asserts that the rhetoric of

the marginality in itself supports the hegemonic cultural system, because it encloses itself

inside a relation of dichotomies and binary conceptions of self/other: "[These] objections

to marginal positionality raise significant questions concerning the political

(in)effectiveness of identity politics and other oppositional forms of resistance, especially

when applied to writings of contemporary U.S. feminists who locate themselves on the

margins and speak in the voice of the other(s)" (“DeCentering” 24). According to

Keating, the binary center/margin produces dualisms that maintain the existing relations

of power. The margins produce more margins, and the conceptions of self/other promote

a worldview divided in oppositions. This is because acceptance of the marginalized

voice reinforces the dichotomy oppressor/oppressed (24). Keating, however, points out

that these dualisms can be challenged by giving up Western notions of a unitary self and

replacing them with notions of liminal identities that are constructed differentially (25).

An example of this is Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness and Borderlands thinking.

According to Keating, Anzaldúa’s theories involve tactical renaming and enactment of a

series of displacements that confound established margin/center divisions (25).

While hooks’s theory about the margin and center appears dualistic, Soja has

pointed out that her notions have elements of a third space narrative. In his view, in

12

Yearning, hooks consistently and creatively uses the trialectics of spatiality as an

alternative way of understanding space as a trans-disciplinary standpoint (Soja 104). The

idea of the margin as a site of radical openness makes it an open space of resistance that

is “continuously formed” (hooks, Yearning 153), where “we are transformed

individually, collectively as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains

our subjectivity” (153). In this context, the margin becomes a space of different

possibilities for cultural transformation and emerging subjectivities.

Historicity is another important element emphasized by many theorists. Although

hooks warned us that remembering in itself can become a nostalgic longing for something

that was (147), re-interpretation of history has been important to the liberation struggles

of minority groups. For example, the Central American father of liberation psychology,

Ignacio Martín-Baró, said that history and knowledge are important because they

facilitate understanding of objective realities, contribute to the humanization of people

and help the group to take charge of its own destiny (39). When marginalized people

become aware of their past and the political forces of their present, they become involved

in a process of personal and social transformation through which they begin to see the

dialectic of their world (Martín-Baró 40). For Martín-Baró, as for liberation theologians,

the development of a new epistemology and new praxis are important milestones in the

liberation of oppressed groups (26). This resonates with hooks’s call for a radical cultural

practice (Yearning 149) and Anzaldúa’s mestiza way, which involves rupture with all

oppressive traditions, reinterpretation of history, and the adoption of new attitudes

towards subgroups, previously discriminated against, i.e. women, other races, and queers

(Borderlands 104). In the same vein as Martín-Baró, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire

13

talks about concientización as one of the cornerstones of liberation — being able to

articulate how history and existing power structures impact the here and now. Theresa

Delgadillo adds to these ideas the concept of hybrid spirituality. This involves a

spirituality that combines cultural and political resistance and different traditions of

religious and spiritual practices (889). She says: “Through an emphasis on communities

of women,8

a Chicana feminism fueled by a woman-centered spirituality emerges to

challenge the subjugation of women within and without Chicana/o cultures, the

marginalization of other sectors of U.S. society, and the destruction of the environment”

(888). In Anzaldúa, the Borderlands spirituality borrows from what she calls “folk

Catholicism” (Borderlands 49). This combines Roman Catholic beliefs with ancient

indigenous spirituality and revives old connections to feminine Aztec deities. As an

example, the Virgin of Guadalupe functions as the cross-over between the Christian

Madonna and the Aztec goddess Tonantzin.

While both Anzaldúa and hooks talk about the violence and creative potential of

the Borderlands in the United States, Ursula Biemann focused her video essay

“Performing the Border” on the feminization and sexualizing of the present global

economy south of the Mexican border. According to Biemann, in the technological space

of U.S. multinational corporations, for example, in Ciudad Juarez, women not only find a

way to become breadwinners and, therefore, reverse traditional sex roles,9

but also in the

process become targets of sexual desire and violence. In Biemann’s view, the border is an

“uncharted territory where people vacillate between rural and urban conditions, between

street vendors and manufacturing of high-tech equipment for the information industry”

(100). She points out that the machine culture has not only outsourced production south

14

of the border but also exported the urban pathology of serial killing, mostly of women

(129). While this is especially true for Ciudad Juarez, other areas of the border have also

become increasingly violent. In effect, the desert on the Mexican side of the border

becomes “a U.S. wasteland of technology where the fragmented bodies of young

Mexican women symbolize what Julia Kristeva calls ‘the jettisoned object’ that is

radically excluded and draws a person toward a place where meaning collapses” (qtd. in

Biemann 2).10

Paradoxically, the notion of border has become more fluid as

multinational companies have moved south, extending their reach to Mexico, while

military control on the northern side is increased to keep the unwanted from coming to

the United States. For many women who come to Ciudad Juarez and other near-by cities,

crossing borders (both symbolic and geopolitical) becomes an activity through which new

subjectivities are negotiated. As Bertha Jottar notes, the border itself is rearticulated

through the power relationships that are produced by the crossing of people (Biemann

162). The dialectical relationship between the space and persons inhabiting the border

serves to redefine cultural practices, conventions, and a person’s sense of self. Violence,

then, becomes a trademark of industrialization and militarization of the border, and the

construction of border subjectivities. These border subjectivities and their expression in

literary and art works are also the focus of my dissertation.

Politicized artistic efforts such as Biemann’s “Performing the Border” add to the

existing discourse in an important way, despite the fact that it has been perceived, for

instance by Rosa Linda Fregoso as an example of how a First World feminist power

defines Third World women as “objects of capital” thanks to the film’s metonymic

association of maquila-workers — sex workers — as victims of femicide (meXicana13).

15

At the same time, it is difficult to ignore the increasing violence on the border, especially

towards young women. Mexican drug cartels and the trade in powerful firearms are

partially responsible for the assaults. Killings on both sides of the border significantly

impact everyday life in the border zone. The murders and disappearances depicted in

Biemann’s film mirror Anzaldúa’s ideas about the border as a locus of violent collisions

and bleeding, particularly after heavy industrialization of the area and growing economic

inequities on the Mexican side that force migration to the north, across the U.S. border.

Biemann’s work reminds us of how masculine power structures and Western ideals of

profitable industrial production have a direct impact on women’s well-being. Women’s

dead bodies are part of what Kristeva calls the abject body: “A decaying body, lifeless,

completely turned into dejection… the corpse represents fundamental pollution” (qtd. in

Biemann 109). Mary Pat Brady adds to this notion by suggesting that the abjection

machine of the border also “transforms people to ‘aliens,’ ‘illegals,’ ‘wetbacks,’ or

‘undocumented,’ un-intelligible (or unintelligent), ontologically impossible, outside the

real and the human” (50). The theory of the border as a machine that produces abject

bodies, complements Anzaldúa’s notions of the zone being inhabited by los atravesados,

people who are not considered normal, who are half-breed and half-dead (Borderlands

25).

On the other hand, the notion of the border appears frequently in the context of

U.S. Latina/o writing. Literature itself can be seen as an ever-changing frontier, a site of

creativity. For instance, Gustavo Peréz Firmat and José David Saldívar offer the

following vision:

La literatura latina no es un territorio estable y continuo que pueda medirse,

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trazarse y colonizarse; en cambio, es un borde, una frontera, un límite complejo y

cambiante… el punto de articulación de diferentes culturas, lenguas y valores

(qtd. in Loustau 40).

Closely connected to theories of border are notions of Chicana/o identity that have

been a focus in U.S. Latina/o literature since the annexation of Mexican territories.

Especially in Chicana creative works, the border has been an important theme because of

the marginalization and silencing women experienced in the past as a result of official

discourse.11

Women writers in particular have worked to expand the borders and move

beyond them, speaking from the interstices of the dominant culture, and making their

voices heard. Within the official discourse, border or interstitial subjects are often

described as unstable, changing, and plural, as evinced in the work of first wave Chicana

scholars, writers and visual artists, who are the subject of this dissertation titled “Our

Ladies: Third Space Identities in Chicana Artistic Expression, 1970-2000.” I use the

appellation “Our Ladies” not only to refer to the central place of La Virgen de

Guadalupe, La Llorona and La Malinche in Chicana feminist revisionist scholarship, but

also to evoke the critical contributions of Chicana scholars, writers, and artists, such as

Anzaldúa, Cervantes, Cantú, and Lopez, whose works I examine in the dissertation.

Chicano Struggle for Self-Determination

As pointed out by many researchers, such as Laura Gómez and Rodolfo Acuña,

people of Mexican descent became an ethnic group in the United States after the

Mexican-American War (1846-1848), and after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was

signed. Since much of the present U.S. Southwest was appropriated from Mexico in

1848, its people were given the option of leaving or staying and obtaining the rights of

17

U.S. citizens, provided that they chose to give up their Mexican citizenship (Gómez 42,

43). Citizenship rights for newly incorporated Mexicans, however, were vague and

confusing to the Mexican negotiators because federal citizenship was inferior to state

citizenship (45). Those people who held federal citizenship were protected under the

Constitution but had no political rights. For instance, in Florida political rights were tied

to state citizenship (Gómez 43, 44). In practice, therefore, Mexican Americans, who

were guaranteed only federal citizenship, had no political rights.12

The dominant Euro-

American population also viewed them as racially inferior. They were stereotyped as

lazy, dirty, apathetic and unproductive in the growing economy, not worthy to be called

citizens, in spite of the fact that they made up a significant part of the work force in

industries such as railroad maintenance and mineral mining in the Midwest and

Southwest (Acuña 88-89).

When Mexicans, for instance in California, resisted the Anglo occupation, they

were outnumbered. In the mid-1850s, other forms of resistance emerged. Acuña writes

of Francisco Ramírez who published his own newspaper in an effort to champion the

Mexican American cause (112). He also protested the lynching of Mexicans, and Anglo

American nativism, the goal of which, he argued, was to force out people whom he called

the “first occupants of the land” (Acuña 112). Another form of resistance was through

antisocial acts, for instance highway banditry. As an example, Acuña brings up the life

of Tiburcio Vasquez who was indicted for horse stealing, robbing the Southern Pacific

payroll train, and tying up and robbing thirty-five men in Kingston, California. While

these were serious criminal acts, Acuña considers this behavior self-defense in a society

that degraded Mexicans and did not afford them the possibility of earning a living within

18

the established economic and political structure (114). Although many Mexicans have

turned Tiburcio Vasquez into a folk hero, antisocial acts like his often resulted in

Mexican Americans being commonly labeled as criminals. Acuña summarizes Mexican

resistance in the following way:

Most Anglo Americans believed that, based on their right of conquest, they were

entitled to special privileges and a special citizenship status; this was reinforced

by a belief in racial superiority. The Chicano, in contrast, was a conquered

person, an alien and a half-breed. When a small number of Chicanos turned to

highway banditry, Anglo Americans did not bother to investigate why they

committed antisocial acts or why the Chicano masses supported them. They

merely stereotyped the entire group as criminal, justifying further violence against

the Mexican American community. These factors created the colonization of the

Chicano in California… (118).

Fueled by attitudes of xenophobia and a perceived economic threat from successful

Mexican gold-miners in California, many were lynched without access to a fair trial or to

the justice system in general.

In the early 1900s, large numbers of Mexicans immigrated to the United States as

agricultural labor or as refugees from the Mexican Revolution (1910-16). According to

Yolanda Alaniz and Megan Cornish, the fact that Chicanos and Mexicans, who worked in

the fields, were considered “foreigners,” made it easy to deport them in times of labor

surplus (128). Still during the 1920s, Mexicans were considered an ideal agricultural

work force (128). The growers reaped big profits from their labor. According to Alaniz

and Cornish, in 1928, Mexican farm workers were paid 35 cents an hour. During the

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Great Depression, the wages decreased to 14 cents an hour, slashing the laborers’ already

meager income (128-129). Mexican workers were also considered an ideal labor force

because they could be cheaply deported (128). The practice of deportation became a

more popular option in the 1930s, resulting in the repatriation of Mexican Americans,

which occurred after the economic depression hit in the 1920s. Since deportation was

considered an acceptable way to get rid of the labor surplus and preserve work for

Americans, many Mexicans left voluntarily to avoid the humiliation of forced

deportation. Some did this to avoid violent confrontations with native mobs, as occurred

in Terre Haute, Indiana, where Mexican railroad workers were forced off their jobs by a

large group of men and women (Balderrama and Rodríguez 99). Acuña points out that

repatriation was a natural reaction to the Depression of the 1930s, when brown people

were encouraged to return to their countries of origin: “During this time, the border was a

revolving door that was open and shut depending on the industrial needs of the United

States. It was never shut in the years when Mexican labor was needed” (218). Thus,

Mexican Americans became a labor resource in times of need and scapegoats for the ills

of Anglo society during periods of internal duress and turmoil. The economic inequities

and discrimination of Mexicans resulted in protests. Alaniz and Cornish report that in the

early 1900s there were periods of labor unrest due to low wages, poverty living

conditions, and lack of citizen rights. These were, however, violently suppressed by

growers (132). For instance, when Mexican laborers tried to bring in unions, the farmers

brought vigilantes to intimidate them and discouraged labor organizers from joining them

(132).

According to Elizabeth Jacobs, it was the annexation of 1848 and the loss of the

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Mexican territory that later led to the militant resistance of the Chicano Movement,

including the strike of the farm workers in California, for example, or land-grant

struggles in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico (3). The term “Chicano” itself refers to people

of Mexican descent who live in the United States and who were radicalized and

politicized during the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1960s and 1970s. The origin of the

word Chicano is not fully known, although it is assumed to come from mexicano or its

Nahuatl equivalent, Meshicano. It has been closely linked to the rising nationalist

movements of Mexican Americans, both as a political and identity marker. As indicated

earlier, the Chicano Movement resisted Anglo dominance, previously accepted notions of

assimilation, and brought to the forefront old ethnic traditions and pride in the indigenous

origins of the group.

Ignacio García divides the development of Chicanismo into four phases. The first

phase involved rejection of the liberal agenda and the way that Mexican Americans had

been assimilated into society.13

In the second phase, old heroes were revived and history

was re-interpreted in an effort to dismiss negative stereotypes and replace them with more

positive ones, in line with the new Chicano political and cultural ethos. The third phase

involved a new focus on Chicano class and racial issues and alliance-building with other

Third World liberation movements, while the fourth consisted of oppositional politics and

the development of leadership (García 9-13).14

Although many women supported the overall goals of the Movement, it was

largely a male organization, in which Chicanas occupied subordinated positions or

functioned in supportive roles. As a result of the exclusionary, masculinist practices of

the Chicano Movement, Chicana discontent increased, and an incipient feminist

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movement developed with an agenda that focused on the issues of women. The first

wave of Chicana literature and cultural production, including visual artists, gave a voice

to some of these new concerns.

Migration and Questions of Identity

The traditional role of the Latina woman is that of mother and wife. Although

research shows that Latina identity is shaped by ethnicity, class, and gender (Chavira-

Prado 244), the traditional Latino family structure is dominated by men, according to the

principles of machismo, while women are expected to bear, nurture, and socialize

children, be submissive to their husbands and respect his parents (255). Although

subservience to males has been a cultural expectation, women experience power in other

areas of life, for instance as mothers and grandmothers (Espin 88). In fact, Aída Hurtado

states that virginity until marriage, or the idea of the virtuous woman, gives Latinas the

revered status of wife, mother, and eventually grandmother (398). Stereotypically, the

Latina woman positions herself according to the principles of marianismo, or the cult of

the Virgin Mary. Evelyn Stevens explains that there is a nearly universal agreement

about the behavior of the ideal woman, which includes such characteristics as moral

superiority, spiritual strength, humility, abnegation, sacrifice, and chastity (94). Although

some feminists have questioned the existence of marianismo in modern Latin American

culture, Catholic dogma has facilitated the continuance of these values, at least in some

form. For instance, Carla Trujillo suggests that “the Church created the image of the

Virgin Mary into ‘a role model for the feminine ideal.’ The men of the church support

this image and teach their brethren to desire it in their women, while teaching women to

emulate and personify it” (219). Similarly, Consuelo Nieto states that veneration of the

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Virgin Mary has had a tremendous impact on the development of the Chicana (208). She

sees this impact as crippling Chicana women because it has restricted their role and made

it hard to fulfill their full personhood (208). Although some of these values may change

or disappear as Latinas immigrate to the United States through acculturation to the mores

of the new country, Latino families vary in the degree to which they retain traditional

values (Chavira-Prado 256). For instance, Thomas Boswell and James Curtis note that

language is most quickly modified in a new culture while religion and cuisine may persist

for an indefinite period (qtd. in Chavira-Prado 256). Assimilation, acculturation, and

migration are important areas of inquiry for this dissertation, as it explores the multiple

expressions of Chicana subjectivities, developed at the crossroads of all these factors.

The process of migration has a psychological impact on the immigrant because it

causes changes in his or her identity (Espin 116). As indicated above, acculturation and

adaptation to the new culture take time, as does the re-organization of the psyche. This

process will terminate only after the person accepts the good and the bad of the new

country and incorporates its values and customs into her worldview. Although migration

and the introduction of these new values may cause culture shock, many Latinas/os in the

United States reject traditional gender roles (Espin 118) and seek out other alternatives.

There may, however, be a conflict whenever the immigrant tries to recreate her

ethnicity and employ her own ethnic signs (Christian, “Performing” 172). This occurs

primarily when she focuses on what differentiates her from the dominant culture, because

she wants to avoid suppressing the ethnic characteristics she feels are her own (172).

According to William Boelhower, this kind of multicultural project is associated with the

memory of the ethnic subject, through which she maintains contact with the foundational

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world of her ancestors: "The importance of this discourse lies in its capacity to create a

new ethnic space, built upon the foundation of past and memory, yet ultimately

independent of them" (qtd. in “Performing” 173). This space resembles the margin space

discussed by hooks, the Borderlands of Anzaldúa and Soja’s Third Space, because

identity formation is a site where, mediated by memory, hybrid alternatives and new

identities are created.

As shown above, Anzaldúa's theoretical formulation regarding the construction of

multiple female identities offers an alternative that decentralizes the self/other, and

margin/center dichotomies, and situates "the other within one's self,” transforming the

essentialized conceptions of identity formation into transcultural and transgendered

models of subjectivity. The introduction of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue into Anzaldúa’s

discourse not only signifies an indigenous space of resistance against the hegemonic

culture, but also the intersticios of ambivalence and acceptance of "patriarchal values

within the Chicano culture that are equally exclusionary as the racism of the hegemonic

culture, and moreover, these exclusionary structures are intricately connected" (Blom

311).

Anzaldúa talks about the mestiza consciousness that emerges from "racial,

ideological, cultural, and biological cross-pollination" (Borderlands 99), or "crossing

over," forming a "hybrid progeny" and a free consciousness (99). This is the result of a

combination of many influences, many subjectivities and their simultaneous presence in

many different worlds:

Because I, mestiza,

continually walk out of one culture

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and into another,

because I am in all cultures at the same time,

alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,

me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.

Estoy morteada por todas las voces que me hablan

simultaneamente. (Borderlands 99)

Within this context, Anzaldúa’s subject is situated in multiple locations and encounters

different oppositions transforming them into an identity that combines everything and

subverts the existing social norms and relations of power. Anzaldúa, like other Chicana

writers, "locates herself on Trinh’s ever-shifting marker separating I from Not I, us from

them, and invents new spaces for convers(at)iones -- transformational dialogues --

between and among non-unitary plural subjects" (Keating, “DeCentering” 39). The

benefit of this conceptualization is that it considers plural subjects and changing realities

that form the basis for the identity. This way, Anzaldúa avoids vacillating between

opposite poles and locates herself in the multiplicity of herself and her voice (Lunsford

43), where the different parts of her identity or subjectivity mix and overlap, creating new

alternatives and a new consciousness: "Soy un amasimiento. I am an act of kneading, of

uniting and joining that not only has produced a creature of darkness and a creature of

light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them

new meanings" (Borderlands 103). In the process of kneading and joining, the questions

of language, class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality are re-configured as products of social

and historical contingencies (Bromley 293), and the inaccuracies of a Eurocentric and

racist history are opposed through a creative discourse (Adams,“Northamerican” 137). In

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Anzaldúa’s work, the mix of linguistic codes serves as an act of self-affirmation and pride

(Leland 172). Furthermore, the function of her anger is to resist the silencing of her

speech: "Though annexed, she is not conquered" (Reuman 310). On the other hand, the

rage that the mestiza at times feels against her own person, may be an example of her

internalized oppression. Only after she deconstructs her masculinist worldview and her

internalized Eurocentric values can she create her own world (Keating, “Reading” 169).

The identity of immigrants in the United States is a combination of elements that

they internalized in their own cultures, traumatic experiences of violence and migration,

and values of their Borderlands, where the Hispanic and the North American worlds

clash. The theories of hooks, Martín-Baró, Boelhower, Soja, and Anzaldúa help us

reconstruct the experiences of women on the margins of dominant culture as they re-

conceptualize their discourses from within their own spaces.

Theoretical and Methodological Considerations

In order to write about multiple female subjectivities in Chicana literature and

artistic expression, it is necessary to review the theories of experts who have written

about the construction of the subject. As mentioned above, the intersections between

identity and Borderland theories inform the theoretical basis of my project. First, I define

subjectivity as the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions that contribute to a

person’s sense of self and her ways of understanding her relationship with the world

(Weedon 32). My work on subject formation engages a variety of theories from the

fields of (multi)cultural studies, literature, psychology, geography, Third World

feminisms, photography, art, and history. I start from the assumption that the United

States is a country of different cultures with multiethnic, multiracial and multi-

26

geographical influences, thus moving away from the much-cited “melting pot” ideology,

whose ideal is assimilation and dismissal of the multifaceted ways in which people of

other cultures maintain their connection to their countries of origin and traditions, while

developing new subjectivities that incorporate traces of the old homeland and of the host

country. Much of the earlier research on multiculturalism focuses on biculturalism and

acculturation to explain the identity development of immigrants, who are often called

“new Americans.” While such research helps us understand some of the differences

between immigrant groups and the mainstream American population, the argumentation

still follows a binary division of American/not American, or degrees of

“Americanization” that can be charted on a two-dimensional continuum. This does not

take fully into account the plurality of ethnic subjectivities, or what Anzaldúa and Soja

call a dialectically open logic of “both/and also” (Soja 60). Soja, moreover, explains that

there exists an option to move away from binaries “by introducing an-Other term, a third

possibility or ‘moment’ that partakes of the original pairing but is not just a simple

combination or an ‘in-between’ position along some all-inclusive continuum” (60).15

This idea of creating a third dimension opens up possibilities from which to

theorize about border experience. Some U.S. cultural critics have already pointed out, as

does Boelhower in Through a Glass Darkly, the complexity of a multicultural project

grounded in the memory of the ethnic subject, through which (s)he maintains contact

with the world of his/her ancestors as (s)he reproduces him/herself as a member of the

ethnic community. Boelhower argues that the ethnic subject always represents a

destabilizing factor in the dominant ideology because it is plural and multiform, in and

out of the culture, changing roles, and producing ethnic discontinuity on the national

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map.

As explained before, Third World Feminists write about multiple subjectivities,

developing from Third World women’s experiences of multiple oppressions, and what

hooks calls a struggle of memory against forgetting (hooks 153). This has

transformational individual and collective power for minority groups, because it is from

the experience of being-on-the-margin and “crossing over” that the oppositional world

view develops and opens up a radical creative space. Similarly, Anzaldúa’s notions about

the conciencia mestiza stem from “racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-

pollination” (Borderlands 99). According to Anzaldúa, the border experience exists

where two cultures violently collide against each other and wherever two opposing

ideologies come together. Perhaps more than any other Chicana writer, Anzaldúa offers

theoretical identity formulations that decentralize the dichotomy of “self/other” and

construct “the other within one’s self,” challenging essentialist conceptions and moving

towards trans-cultural and trans-gendered models of subjectivity. Her concept of

interstices, corresponding roughly to Homi Bhabha’s in-between space, is used in my

research as a third location of creativity and identity formation. For Bhabha, cultural

hybridity “gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new

area of negotiation of meaning and representation” (“The Third Space” 211). Similarly, I

theorize that the Chicana authors I study write from the in-between spaces of the official

discourse, where the contradictions and creation of new elements go hand-in-hand. In

Bhabha’s notion of liminal space, he pointed ut out that the borderline work of culture

does not merely recall the past as an aesthetic precedent, but renews the past and

refigures it as a contingent in-between space that innovates and interrupts the

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performance of the present (“Beyond” 62).

Similarly, in “Mestizaje as Method: Feminists of Color Challenge the Canon,”

Chela Sandoval presents a theory of oppositional consciousness, which includes five

points of resistance to the U.S. social hierarchy. According to Sandoval, the first four

points include: (1) the “assimilationist” mode; (2) the “revolutionary” mode; (3) the

“supremacist” mode; and (4) the “separatist” mode. The fifth of these positions, called

the differential or mestiza mode, deploys each of the other modes as a potential

technology of power.16

Sandoval compares the differential mode to a trickster position in

which “subjectivity as masquerade” is used to access different identity, ideological,

aesthetic, and political positions. It requires differential movement through multiple

systems of resistance and meaning to ensure egalitarian social relations in the political

area of the culture (“Mestizaje” 360). Consequently, Sandoval’s notions about

oppositional consciousness and modes of resistance provide a tool that is helpful for

analyzing modes of Chicana resistance in literary and art works.

Norma Alarcón is another important Chicana feminist theorist who has

contributed significantly to the field of Chicana literature and female subjectivities since

the publication of the anthology This Bridge Called My Back, in 1981. Her article ”A

Re-Vision Through Malintzin/ or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object” is an early

effort to expose the mythical and historical distortions to which patriarchy has subjected

the person of Malinche as the prostitute/mother of the new mestizo race, thus splitting off

the sexuality of Chicana subjectivities according to a masculine tradition. Alarcón’s

theorizing focused on Chicana feminist revisions around the person of Malinche as an

agent and producer of history, speaking subject, and in-between translator, negotiator,

29

and survivor of violence. Alarcón has consistently argued against traditional notions of

an autonomous, unitary subject, showing that women of color are subjects-in-process

whose identity-in-difference (“Conjugating” 136) operates in the interstices of dominant

identity politics. To her, women of color function in non-unitary and conflictive

positions. Consequently, the multiple subjectivities arise in liminal conflict situations

and are produced by contradictory discourses. Alarcón writes,

The critical desire to undercut subject determination through structures and

discourses, in my view, presupposes a subject-in-process who constructs

provisional identities, or Sandoval’s tactical subjectivity, which subsume a

network of signifying practices and structural experiences imbricated in the

historical and imaginary shifting national borders of Mexico and the United States

for Chicanas… (“Conjugating” 137)

More recently, Mary Pat Brady has pointed out that in spite of Alarcón’s

numerous essays on the subject and her role as publisher of Third Woman Press, she has

received little critique for her ideas by other Chicana scholars. One of the problems in

Alarcón’s theory on subject formation has to do with a negation of experience and its

primary focus on discursive practices only. For instance, Shari Stone-Mediatore argues

that experience can be conceptualized in non-essentialist ways. Citing the works of

Chandra Mohanty, she explains that “efforts to remember and to narrate everyday

experiences of domination and resistance, and to situate these experiences in relation to

broader historical phenomena, can contribute to the development of oppositional

consciousness” (qtd. in Stone-Mediatore 123), because recording, re-interpreting, and

reprocessing lived experiences in a collective context makes possible identification with

30

oppositional struggles and the assumption of new subjectivities.

Paula Moya, moreover, has developed alternative ideas about female subjectivity

in which she openly criticizes postmodern notions of identity, especially those of

Sandoval and Alarcón. In Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural

Struggles, Moya argues that identities are social constructs that depend on the context of

the person. They are not arbitrary, because they refer to verifiable aspects of the social

world. She challenges the assumption that multiple subjectivities are incoherent, because

identity is founded in social categories, such as race, class, gender and sexuality, and

mediated by experience. For Moya, there is no proof that conflictive discourses are also

contradictory. According to her, the idea that identities constantly shift in response to

changes in circumstances is questionable because it does not leave room for a more stable

construct of identity. As an example, she cites the image of a Mexican lesbian mother

from the working class who presents herself as Chicana in one context, as a woman of

color in another and as mother in a third. These identities are relatively stable although

their representation varies in different contexts. Moya theorizes:

Within a realist framework, oppositional ideologies (and the identities they

engender) are more than sites of political and theoretical resistance to be

pragmatically or strategically occupied or abandoned. Rather they are ways

individuals or groups perceive, interpret, and interact with the world around them.

Thus, a change in ideology or identity can represent a movement toward a better

(or worse) understanding of the social world. (91)

Overall, my study borrows from Third World feminist thinking and Moya’s post-

positivist notions, not to mention the French theorists in this context, although their ideas

31

are not often considered germane to those of women of color. At the height of the

feminist movement, Audre Lorde stated at the Second Sex Conference in 1979, that “the

master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (“Master’s” 99). While the

French feminists did not echo patriarchal masculine theory in their writings, white

women’s liberal feminism was considered too narrowly gender-based and, therefore, not

applicable into Third World circumstances. I, however, believe that these theories have

more cross-cultural value than they are credited with. Jacques Lacan’s description of the

mirror phase, elaborated in Ecrits, and Julia Kristeva’s notions about the semiotic chora,

which refers to the articulation of unconscious processes that fracture images and

maintain the status quo of language, can be helpful analytical tools. For instance, chora

is an underlying nonverbal, non-spatial and non-temporal aspect of language that contains

libidinal energy and has a direct connection with subjectivity, preceding its formation.

Similarly, Luce Irigaray’s notions about the plurality of female eroticism and notions of

parler femme, establish female sexuality as the basis for the unique way women

communicate and write. Although they can be useful, I will utilize these theories only

minimally in this dissertation.

Since my study involves a variety of genres, including photography, I engage

concepts related to what Marianne Hirsch calls the “familial gaze,” which draws attention

to the hierarchy of family members, and the conventions and ideologies through which

family members see themselves and each other. Family photographs have a connection

to narrative, memory, and mourning, each of which merit separate analysis. Still more

interesting are the theories of photography that Roland Barthes presents in Camera

lucida, making a distinction between studium, or the general affect of the photograph, and

32

punctum, which is an element that fragments it. A punctum is a sting, a peck, a little hole

or, in photographic terms, an accident that “pricks” the viewer, or is poignant to him/her

(27). If studium consists of the general affective impression (liking/not liking) of the

picture, the punctum is a detail, a partial object, that potentially expands the vision. This

introduces a third element, which brings to the forefront another reality, hidden from

direct vision. The concept the punctum is relevant to my dissertation, because, like the

notions of the third space, it brings in a third element that uncovers previously hidden

elements.

Master’s Tools

Although there are a significant number of critical articles focusing on female

subjectivities and border theory in Latina/Chicana literature, I will discuss only the most

important early texts of relevance to my project. Among them, Breaking Boundaries,

edited by Asunción Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina Scott and Nancy Saporta, while

not a Chicana text, was an early effort to compile a corpus of U.S. Latina literary writing.

The value of this book lies in its historical review of how Latina women were able to

break into the literary field as a result of their increased educational level and the new

cultural spaces, opened up to them by feminist discourse, emancipatory minority

movements and participation in public poetry readings. This period was concerned with

consciousness-raising, focusing to a large extent on the oppression and inequality of

women, which were reflected in women’s literary texts as a role reversal (i.e., replacing

the male head of the household by a woman). These themes are important in the texts of

the authors I am studying.

At around the same time, María Herrera-Sobek edited a collection of critical

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articles under the title of Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana

Literature. Again, these were early writings that featured Chicana authors from the early

part of the twentieth century to 1983. Such themes as Chicano machismo, re-evaluation

of La Malinche, and the search for female identity started to appear more regularly in

anthologies. Two of the poets of my study, Lorna Dee Cervantes and Alma Villanueva,

were included in this publication, the former as an example of Chicana humor and the

latter as a creator of a primal world where woman is the root of all life. In these texts, the

poets deal with the tensions of gender oppression, search for alternative female spaces,

role reversals, and reinterpretation of myths. Later, Herrera-Sobek and Helena María

Viramontes edited Chicana Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American

Literature, which includes both theoretical and creative writings of known Chicana

authors. The range of themes in this publication is much broader and looks at innovation

of form and content in the work of Chicana writers, in addition to more female-centered

and political pieces. The tough, alienated image of the pachuca, the world of the

dispossessed and illegal aliens, the ecological problems of Mexican farm-workers, sexual

violation, erotic female passion, and criticism of the patriarchal culture are addressed

more directly. Questions of direction for future Chicana literary analysis begin to take

shape and lead to the formation of two divided camps, one accepting European,

American, and feminist discourses as tools for analyzing Chicana writing, and the second

rejecting white theorists and looking for an authentic Chicana critical discourse. Tey

Diana Rebolledo’s Women Singing in the Snow follows a similar pattern, although it

includes a full historical review of Chicana literature since the nineteenth century. This

publication is important because one of its themes was to show how ” The colonized

34

subject breaks the silence and seizes subjectivity” (5). Rebolledo views this as a difficult

process, as it involves first finding language, then voice, consciousness of self, and

finally self-insertion as a subject into a literary text. Issues of becoming a speaking

subject, having multiple identities in different cultures and weaving a subject-

consciousness that is shifting, complex and changing, already reflect the larger Chicana

cultural preoccupations in the 1990s.

Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón and Minoo Moallem’s Between Woman and

Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State takes a more critical stand

on nation-state formation, transnational subjects of feminism and Chicana resistance to

patriarchal ideologies. In the essays of this book, problematics of gender, state and

identity remain central. For instance, Laura Elisa Pérez’s chapter on Chicana/o aesthetics

resonates with my study, because she examines paintings of the Virgin of Guadalupe by

Yolanda Lopez as explication of identity categories, such as “woman,” “I,” and

“Chicana.” The tone of Pérez’s writings projects a female image that defies norms

established by the masculine society and the church, and re-establishes women in the

cultural geography. Another chapter in the collection, thematically related to my

dissertation, is written by Rosa Linda Fregoso. It examines how Chicana urban identities,

such as the pachuca, were absent in Chicano Movement’s strategies for cultural

resistance as an oppositional female figure (“Re-Imagining” 72), partially because of its

“threat to the Chicano family romance” (90). Fregoso concludes:

Her [pachuca] comportment registers the outer boundaries of Chicana femininity;

her body marks the limits of la familia; her masquerade accentuates her deviance

from the culture’s normative domestic place for women. And perhaps the

35

production of pachuca-chola-homegirl subjectivities has not been celebrated by

many of us precisely because her body defies, provokes, challenges as it

interrogates the traditional familial basis of our constructions of the Chicano

nation. (90)

While my dissertation does not specifically include notions about the pachuca as

a figure of female resistance, it is a relevant example of yet another bodily expression of

Chicana contestation of the domesticity to which the Chicano Movement and Chicano

culture confined women.

Sonia Saldívar Hull examines more closely the meaning of the border and border

crossings in Feminism of the Border. Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. She

focuses on Chicana identity development, mestiza politics, women’s struggles and

formation of collective solidarities in the border literature, mostly by Anzaldúa, Sandra

Cisneros, and María Helena Viramontes. Similarly, Debra Castillo and María Cordoba

further develop border theory in Border Women: Writing from la Frontera, and examine

the interplay of the dominant Mexican and North American cultures in border women’s

daily lives and writing. In addition to analyzing texts of known Chicana writers, they use

Mexican women’s texts to explore the specific conditions of literary production on both

sides of the border.

Another interesting approach to Latina/o identity is Karen Christian’s Show and

Tell: Identity as Performance in U.S. Latina/o Literature. She uses Judith Butler’s theory

of identity as performance, and Bhabha’s notion of “nation as narration” (14). This

concept establishes a dynamic relationship between ethnic literature and ethnic identity,

because, according to Bhabha, national identity is narrated through the cultural texts of

36

peoples (qtd. in Show and Tell 14). This can be seen as an on-going transformative

process. In addition to the performative aspects of identity, Christian focuses on those

daily practices that transform culture. Perhaps the more creative aspect of her theory is

the idea of identity as drag, which calls for transformations and invention in interaction

with cultural heritage, gender roles, and dominant culture. This is an especially useful

notion for examination of queer images of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

As can be seen above, many critics have studied Latina/o subjectivities in literary

texts using feminist, historical, sociological, and psychological theories to explore the

meaning of identity categories, evolution of the female voice, development of self-

consciousness in the context of gender and race, and finally the use of strategies of

resistance against those who exercise power over minority subjects. In Chicano Studies,

the presence of the U.S.-Mexico border adds a spatial view to theories about female

subjectivities. There are, however, two publications (previously doctoral theses) that

come close to my project. The first was published under the title Extinct Lands,

Temporal Geographies by Mary Pat Brady. Her goal was to examine the role of

narrative and narrative strategies in the production of space in Chicana literature. The

book is divided into six chapters, in which she studies the centrality of space in Chicana

letters, the state-sponsored aesthetic project of the border, the meaning of gender and

sexuality in micro-spatial practice, and what Brady calls narco-spatiality. Her research is

informed by the theories of Soja, Alarcón, María Ruiz de Burton, Rebolledo, Saldívar,

and Marta Sánchez, and aims to refocus spatial analysis by highlighting problematics of

gender, race, and sexuality in literary texts.

The second publication of relevance to my work is Postmodern Cross-

37

Culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature by Fatima Mujcinovic. While

the author engages a variety of theories, her main intent was to study U.S. Latina

literature as an inclusive literary tradition, from the viewpoint of postmodern narrative

strategies. She investigates biculturalism as a space that produces differential subjectivity

and hybridity, diasporic identities, and geopolitical conditions that resist subjugation and

oppression. Mujcinovic borrows from U.S. Third World feminisms, Bhabha’s

postcolonial theory, and Amy Kaminsky’s notions of exile. While Brady writes about the

production of space and spatial articulation in Chicana narrative, Mujcinovic looks for

transformative subjectivities within the construct of biculturalism and postmodern

fluidity.

As stated before, I utilize a variety of identity theories that complement and

interrogate each other rather than rely on one ideology alone. The chapters of the

dissertation will show that each genre, be it poetry, visual arts or autobiography,

expresses multiple voices that are often contradictory although not necesarly incoherent.

Moya’s theorization makes it possible to move away from Alarcón’s idea of constantly

shuftin subjectivities and to understand identity as “a historically and materially grounded

perspective” (62), enabling a person to “read the world in a a particular way” (17). The

link between identity, social location, and experience is one of the cornerstones of this

dissertation. While some identity categories are relatively fixed, such as race and gender,

they are experienced differently in different social contexts. Thus, writing from the

spaces in-between on Moraga’s terms means “having a foot in both worlds” and

“refusing the split” (qtd. in Moya 95). The very notion of in-betweeness facilitates

dialogue and incorporates multiple aspects of a person’s being and experience.

38

The dissertation is divided into five parts: an introduction, three chapters, and a

brief concluding chapter. In the introduction (Chapter One), I have explained the research

questions, hypetheses and theories that have guided my study, especially those related to

female (and specifically Chicana) identities, border crossings, and spatiality of artistic

production. I also utilize ideas from many different disciplines, including cultural and

feminist studies, Third World feminisms, history, psychology, art theory, and geography.

I include a small historical review of the context in which Chicana literary and cultural

notions about women have developed.

In Chapter Two, “Poetic Voices and Chicana Identity,” I analyze Chicana poetry

and its relationship to the creation of women’s space and border crossing. The poems

date from the 1970s and 1980s, when women writers were trying to find their place in

literary production and explore Latina (Chicana) identity as a sexual, racial, and political

construct. In this section, I study Emplumada (1981) by Lorna Dee Cervantes; Bloodroot

(1982) by Alma Villanueva; and Borders (1986) by Pat Mora. In Emplumada, the poet

gives voice to the Chicana experience and its relationship to racism, sexism, poverty,

sexual abuse, and domestic violence. Her famous “Cannery Town in August” depicts the

silence, monotony, and loneliness of women in “bodiless uniforms” who perform labor

“dumbed by the can’s clamor” (6). The poetic landscape changes in “For Virginia

Chavez,” where the author speaks from the space of two young girls’ friendship, their

rebellion against the cultural norms and their experience of male violence, which the

poetic voice is able to mediate only through art and transformative imagination.

Geographic border crossing, searching for one’s roots, and “being in and out of both the

home and the host countries” are themes in “Poema para los Californios muertos,”

39

“Oaxaca 1974,” and “Visions of Mexico at a Writing Symposium.” For Cervantes, the

alternative space of creation is found through language and self-empowerment. She

associates the writing of poetry with the braiding of her hair, when she says: “I tie up my

hair in loose braids, and trust only what I have built with my own hands” (14). In her

poems, she searches for thematic and linguistic expressions of Chicana experience within

mainstream society.

Like Cervantes, Villanueva talks about birthing oneself “I/woman give birth: and

this time to myself” (21), to achieve greater self-definition. Bloodroot is written

primarily “woman to woman” and seeks to create a mythical world of natural elements

such as blood, rocks, minerals, and water, in which the poet desires reintegration into the

maternal womb. The theme “bloodroot” (blood of a woman) refers to the fantasy of a

mystical pregnancy that occurs outside of masculine power and gives life to all

humankind. Thus, Villanueva creates a woman’s space, transforms it into the birth place

of both genders, and although essentialist in many ways, attempts to escape binaries

through mythical imagination.

Pat Mora’s Borders is more directly a “fronterizo” book of poems. For Mora, the

border of El Paso/Juarez is both an aesthetic and a political construct. Like Debra

Castillo, she travels north to south, observing the socio-cultural difference between

poverty and privilege that follows the geographical division. While she seeks sources of

female strength in her race and family, she also speaks from the “place in the middle”

(Nepantla), to conserve the tensions and plurality of borderland existence (Murphy,

“Conserving” 60). Much of Mora’s writing tries to capture the energy and positive value

of binaries, such as woman/mother and mother/earth. For instance, in “Desert Women,”

40

she uses the cactus as a symbol of women’s strength and capacity for resistance: “Like

cactus, we’ve learned to hoard, to sprout deep roots...” (80). Similarly, from the start, she

focuses on the divisiveness of borders. In “Bi-lingual Christmas,” the last stanza reveals

the hard realities of the geographical space on the U.S. Mexican border: “Not twinkling

lights we see but search lights seeking illegal aliens outside our thick windows” (21).

And in “Now and Then America,” the poetic voice pleads, “Let me into board rooms,

wearing hot colors, my hair long and free, maybe speaking Spanish. Risk my difference,

my surprises. Grant me a little life, America” (33).

The selected works of Cervantes, Villanueva, and Mora in my study come from

different historical moments in Chicana history, and their identity strategies, therefore,

also differ. During the earlier period, finding a space from which the female voice could

speak was important, while towards the end of the 1990s, resistance to the male order and

the deployment of multiple positions for the subject formation became more prevalent.

My intent is to analyze a variety of different identity positions and points of resistance

that find expression in these collections of poetry.

In Chapter Three, “Chicana Visions Here and Beyond: Our Lady,” I focus on

the digital art of Alma Lopez. Following the revisions of traditional feminine and

religious images by Yolanda Lopez (Appendix, Figures 3, 4, and 5) and Ester Hernández

(Figure 2) decades earlier, Alma Lopez’s Chicana-inspired picture of La Virgen de

Guadalupe (My Lady, 1999, Figure 6) provoked such controversy that the Santa Fe

Museum of International Art nearly removed it from an exhibition in 2001. Since Lopez

produces digital images and uses her friends and other real-life models in the

photographs, her work truly involves what Gaspar de Alba calls embodied aesthetics. In

41

addition to religious borders, Lopez traverses sexual, historical, and cultural frontiers,

positioning herself frequently in Soja’s third space. Her re-interpretation of Guadalupe

consists of a picture of her friend dressed in a bikini of roses standing on a platform held

by an angel with the wings of a Viceroy butterfly. This erotic re-conceptualization of the

virgin creates an effect of sexual agency, while simultaneously functioning as part of a

lesbian self-representation. The Viceroy butterfly symbolizes natural border crossings

between Mexico and the United States, as well as genetic memory. Lopez says that the

image also “mirrors parallel intersecting histories of being different or other even in one’s

own community” (Ramirez, “Borders” 237). The presence of a digitally imaged female

body serves as a text that expresses the complexity of Chicana-lived experiences and

positions the virgin at the intersection of racial and sexual desire. Yolanda Lopez, Ester

Hernández and Alma Lopez perhaps more than other artists and writers in my study,

combine notions of the lived experience as they re-interpret cultural myths and images

from a third dimension. Moreover, Alma Lopez adds a queer re-imagining of the image

of the Virgin.

In Chapter Four, “Fictions of Autobiography and Fictitious Family

Photographs,” I analyze Norma Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la

Frontera. The author calls this book a fictitious autobiography, explaining that “life en la

frontera is raw truth, and stories of such life, fictitious as they may be, are even truer than

true” (xi). The text itself is both an imaginary and real-life collage of events, memories,

photographs, and dialogue that occur on many spatial frontiers, including the geographic,

ethnic, sexual, and linguistic border. Time and narration are fragmented in Canícula,

giving the narrative the effect of an emotional journey, a social history of sorts. In my

42

analysis, I engage theories related to women’s autobiography and family photographs. I

am interested in what Marianne Hirsch calls the “familial gaze,” which reveals true and

false identifications, relationships between family members, and efforts to control the

images, memories, and narrative. Photos also produce agency and resistance. Hirsch

argues that only a careful reading that confronts the personal with cultural, political, and

economic meanings will be able to locate the resistant elements of the photographic

image that are situated somewhere between the line of visibility and invisibility (xi-xv).

In this context, Barthes’s notion of the punctum as a partial object that expands the vision

will add to the exploration of hidden meanings of the picture. Canícula does not follow a

linear plot, but rather combines photographs and stories in a way that foregrounds

contradictions and multiple subject positions of the Chicana third space.

Finally in the Conclusion of the dissertation, I discuss my findings in light of the

theories and texts presented. I show the connections between space, border crossings,

and the multiplicity of Chicana subjectivities. Using Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness

and Moraga’s “theories in the flesh” as a starting point, I hope to stimulate further

dialogue about the construction of the Chicana subject in the third space. The

dissertation shows how Chicana feminist thought evolved over time and how the artistic

work analyzed here served to challenge the sexist and masculinist values of the Chicano

Movement, as well as the discriminatory practices of the dominant culture, thereby giving

a voice to Chicanas. In this study, the female body itself is one of the sites of this

contestation, as seen in the queer image of the Virgin in Alma Lopez’s art or in texts that

depict the marks left on the female body through violence, rape, killing, or the harsh

conditions of factory labor. Chicana voices and subjectivities emerge from these

43

Borderlands conditions, as Anzaldúa proposed. In talking about the violation of women’s

bodies, Antonia Castañeda points out that “these forms of domination, power and

oppression are rooted in the invasion of Americas, in colonialist domination that began

over 500 years ago with Columbus” (“History” 312). It is these forms of domination

carried into the present that the artistic expressions of my dissertation address.

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Notes

1 Escondida is a hide-and-go-seek game that the author played as a child.

She is using it here to stand in for the hidden parts of her identity that she has

tried to bring to light.

2 According to Mujcinovic, Latino literature, created at the margins of the

dominant culture, as a reaction against the stigmatization of its people, inevitably

developed the modernist search for identity as one of its focal points. In the

1960s, demands for political power combined with ideas of mestizaje as a

foundation for ethnic identity formation, gave way in the 1970s to subaltern and

diasporic positioning of the identity question. During the 1980s and 1990s, the

inclusion of female writers opened up a new space for the construction of

gendered subjectivities.

3 Ester Hernández and Yolanda Lopez are the best-known artists of these images.

4

See also Mora, Nepantla, 5-6.

5 I use Mexico as a singular homeland since my focus is only on Chicano history.

Torres broadens the concept of homelands to cover other countries such as Cuba

and Puerto Rico.

6 Terry Eagleton explains, in The Idea of Culture (119), Raymond Williams’ idea

of common culture as a network of shared meanings and activities that strives

towards an advance of consciousness and elicits full collaboration of all its

members.

7 Homi Bhabha talks about “space beyond” and “in-between space” that

innovates and interrupts the present. See The Location of Culture, 7.

45

8

This comment refers to the main characters in Ana Castillo’s novel So Far from

God.

9 The ethic of “high productivity and low cost of labor” that characterizes U.S.

interest in setting up a maquiladora industry in Mexico has not brought wealth

to Mexican border towns. For instance, in Tijuana only 5 percent of families

today are able to provide for their basic needs, while morbidity and mortality

rates remain high. See Gilbert Gonzalez and Raul Fernandez, A Century of

Chicano History: Empire, Nations and Migration, 143-144.

10 See Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror for an in-depth analysis of abjection.

11

This point has been elaborated in Breaking Boundaries by Horno-Delgado,

Ortega, Scott and Sternbach. The book was one of the first collections of

critical articles about U.S. Latina writing, which had been virtually

unrecognized by the literary establishment of the dominant culture.

12 Gomez explains that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall distinguished

between state and federal citizenships. By 1870, this division became a law

that affected former Mexican citizens under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

granting them federal citizenship only.

13 García explains that Mexican Americans were only allowed in the American

mainstream if they gave up their Mexican heritage and integrated into the United

States through education, patriotism, loyalty to the government, and cultural

assimilation (9, 10).

14 According to García, oppositional politics had to do with Chicano rejection of

Anglo society by emphasizing Mexicanness and developing an autonomous

46

party, platforms, and grassroots organizations, which sought to involve

participation of the whole barrio.

15 Soja’s theories are based on Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualization of a triple

dialectic or une dialectique de triplicate, which seeks linkages between space,

time and social being in the making of history. Soja also incorporates Homi

Bhabha’s notions of cultural difference, hybridity and the in-between space,

which I used in the title of my project, to signify an-Other space of ethnic

identity/cultural formation that defies binary logic.

16 According to Sandoval, the “assimilationist” mode can also be labeled a

“liberal” mode of resistance. The “revolutionary” mode corresponds to

“insurgent” resistance, and the “supremacist” mode to cultural-nationalist

resistance while the fourth mode is “separatist.” The fifth tactic, which Sandoval

calls the “differential” or “mestiza” mode utilizes all the other modes of

resistance for intervening in and transforming social relations (“Mestizaje” 359-

360).

17 On identity production and discursive construction of experience, see Joan

Scott, 796-797.

18 Adrienne Rich also explores the relationship between location, poetry, and the

body.

47

CHAPTER TWO

Poetic Voices and Chicana Identity

Every day I am deluged with

reminders that this is not

my land

and this is my land. Cervantes, “Poem for the Young White Man”

Viewing the borderlands as an interstitial site suggests a type of liminality.

The betweenness leads to a becoming, a sense of cultural and personal

identity that highlights flux and fluidity while connected by a string memory

of (a discredited) history and (a devalued) heritage. The articulation of

Chicano poetry is one embodiment of this becoming. Pérez-Torres,

Movements in Chicano Poetry

The Chicano Movement forged ideals of the traditional family and motherhood,

and considered women’s rights a threat to the long-held cultural values of the community,

given the need to keep intact the patriarchal order that existed prior to and during the

conquest (Roth 138). Opposition to these attitudes emerged relatively early, and opening

up a new social space soon became a subject of active debate among women who were

seeking to move away from the patriarchal notions or carnalismo1

of the movement’s

philosophy. As demonstrated in Alma Garcia’s collection of women’s activist writing,

Chicana Feminist Thought, different voices emerged in the 1970s and 1980s “to

overcome sexist oppression but still affirm a militant ethnic consciousness” (1). It was

important for Chicana feminist thinkers to join forces with the Movement's efforts to

48

fight for Chicano civil rights and Mexican American socio-economic self-determination,

while still striving towards gender equality. Chicanas, however, were concerned about

the reception of these new ideals, as Francisca Flores noted in 1971:

More often than not, when the issue of women enters conversation… all of the

defenses go up. The women become defensive because they do not want to be

considered anti-men and the men immediately feel challenged. The composition

of the group does not matter, lower economic or professional, the scene is the

same… Women too: more Chicanas are fighting for their own identity, and they

do not care who does not like it. Women must learn to say what they think and

feel, and be free to state it without apologizing or prefacing every statement to

reassure men that they are not competing with them. (6)

Such ideas, however, remained a source of debate. Inspired by the example of

female role models from Mexican history, such as La Malinche, Sor Juana Inéz de la

Cruz, soldaderas, and Adelitas, some Chicanas sought to develop a feminism that was

rooted in indigenous beliefs, yet part of the ethnic liberation movement, even if Chicana

women were labeled vendidas and agabachadas by many of their male counterparts.2

Early on, Chicanas steered away from Anglo feminism, which they considered a

movement of primarily white middle-class women, in an attempt to remain within the

confines of Mexican American culture (Roth 162). Some activists felt that sexism was a

problem of “the capitalist ideology that advocates male supremacist values” (Nieto

Gomez, “Sexism” 97) and not particularly relevant to Mexican American women, who

were also subject to racial and class oppression. Other Chicana feminists focused on

changing widely accepted stereotypes about Chicanas/os that were reinforced by the

politics of the dominant culture. To counter these common conceptions, Adaljiza Sosa

49

Riddell writes: “We certainly remember mothers and sisters who worked in the fields or

at menial labor in addition to doing work required at home to survive. Submissiveness,

chastity, and unworldliness are luxuries of the rich and/or nearly rich” (Sosa Riddell 93).

While it was acknowledged that Chicana feminism should not imitate Anglo values or

misperceptions of Mexican Americans, but should, instead, address problems of racial

and economic oppression, there were women who challenged the ideals of male

supremacy that for centuries had shaped Mexican American thinking and family

structure. Lesbian rights advocate Carla Trujillo was one of the first Chicana feminists to

focus on the liberation of Chicanas from traditional sex roles, which encouraged women

to see themselves as whole only insofar as they were attached to a man or bearing

children: “We are taught to undervalue our needs and voices. Our viewpoints, opinions

and expertise are considered secondary to those of males – even if we are more highly

trained… we must fight for our own voices as women, since this will ultimately serve to

uplift us as a people” (qtd. in García 285, 286). Consequently, early Chicana feministas,

such as Consuelo Nieto, recommended three steps to promote their liberation: 1) Work

with other Chicanas to define their role, goals, and strategies; 2) Participate in the

Chicano Movement and sensitize men to the issue of women’s oppression; 3) Become

involved in the mainstream women’s rights movement (Nieto 210). Nevertheless, as

much as Chicanas focused on creating a movement that would fit their own cultural

history and dictates, it would be wrong, as Roth points out, to ignore the impact of Anglo

feminism on its development. It was important for Chicanas to not fall into the trap of

replicating the either/or logic of national loyalists who accused Chicanas of vendidismo

(171). Instead, many Chicanas were influenced by mainstream left-wing and black

feminist ideologies, because they linked gender oppression to other forms of oppression.

50

In fact, all three feminist liberation movements (black, white, and Chicana) focused on

the inequalities and discrimination that women experienced in everyday life (Roth 176,

177). While Chicana feminists were influenced by mainstream liberal feminism in their

quest for women’s rights and were to some extent interested in establishing liaisons with

it (Nieto 210), they criticized the movement for its narrow focus on sexism and lack of

attention to race and class.3

Thus, Chicana feminist discourse has been linked to the larger U.S. Third World

feminist movement. One of the first texts to address the problems of all women of color

was This Bridge Called My Back, published in 1981. This text was an effort to piece

together articles, journal entries, letters, interviews, and poems that reflected the thinking

and artistic creativity of a diverse group of women of color, all of whom wanted to write

to and about women and their racial, economic, and sexual oppression. In the

Introduction, Cherríe Moraga stated that she wanted the book to become a revolutionary

tool that would radicalize others into action (xxvi). While the editors’ main goal was to

address discrimination as it pertained to race, class, gender, and sexuality, the authors

also wanted to make a statement about the divisions in the feminist movement and white

feminists’ intolerance regarding issues of difference and prejudice (Moraga, Introduction

xxiii).

The division between white feminists and women of color was raised, for

instance, by Audre Lorde in a letter sent to Mary Daly,4

in which Lorde criticized Daly’s

book Gyn/Ecology for dismissing the heritage of black women:

I feel that you celebrate differences between white women as a creative force

towards change, rather than a reason for misunderstanding and separation. But

you fail to recognize that, as women, those differences expose all women to

51

various forms and degrees of patriarchal oppression, some of which we share, and

some of which we do not.

(“Letter” 97)

Lorde viewed white feminism as a separatist movement that did not promote

understanding and unity between all women, nor see the strength in difference. As she

put it so memorably, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”

(“Tools” 99). Criticizing women who felt they must seek support “in the master’s

house,” Lorde believed that genuine change was possible only through empowering and

connecting women.

Similar sentiments were expressed by Anzaldúa, who had felt different and

alienated since her childhood. As she asserted: “In El Mundo Zurdo,5

I with my own

affinities and my own people with theirs can live together and transform the planet” (“La

Prieta” 209). Anzaldúa, like many other Chicana feminists, felt their strength came from

their indigenous heritage, their Aztec spirituality, and their connection to the Earth. As

previously indicated, Anzaldúa’s theorization of the mestiza consciousness is based on

notions of cultural mestizaje, or the mixing of Indian, Mexican, African, and white

heritage, each part equally important, and not blended together in an assimiliationist way.

Anzaldúa writes,

I am visible — see my Indian face — yet I am in visible. I both blind them with

my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They’d like to think I

have melted in the pot. But I haven’t, we haven’t. (Borderlands, 86)

Nurtured by new feminist ideals, Chicana poets of the 1970s and 1980s, such as

Alma Villanueva, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Bernice Zamora, Denise Chavez, and

52

Evangelina Vigil started to publish their works. While Rafael Pérez-Torres points to

1965 as the birth year of Chicanismo and Chicano poetry, it was not until the mid-1980s

that emerging Chicana literary criticism made Chicana writing more widely known (51).

Much of Chicana writing focused on sociopolitical and more subjective themes about the

position and identity of women. Even though not all writers labeled themselves feminists,

many Chicana poets wrote on the emerging themes of empowerment, the celebration of

femaleness, and consciousness-raising about the oppressive conditions of Chicano life.

Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano writes:

Perhaps the most important principle of Chicana feminist criticism is the

realization that the Chicana’s experience as a woman is inextricable from her

experience as a member of an oppressed working-class minority and a culture

which is not the dominant culture. Her task is to show how in works by Chicanas,

elements of gender, race, culture, and class coalesce. (“Chicana Literature” 214)

Like Anzaldúa, Yarbro-Bejarano links the terms “Chicana” and “mestiza” to show the

multiplicity of racial and historical elements that factor into Chicana writing and identity.

Following these themes and developments in Chicana feminist thought and

writing, I will explore in this chapter how Chicana poets of the 1970s and 1980s situated

themselves within the larger context of Chicanismo and started to deploy feminist

discursive strategies to subvert existing stereotypes and dispel essentialist notions about

women. I will also utilize theorizations about border-crossing to analyze the

development of multiple identities and the subject-in-process in the works of the poets

Alma Villanueva, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Pat Mora. I will argue that the location from

which they write, the border itself and its multiple crossings, foregrounds their sense of

53

self and their artistic expression. In many ways, Chicana poets of this era developed

works about their maturation into adulthood. Therefore, the poems could also be

categorized as coming of age narratives.

Alma Villanueva

Alma Villanueva’s first collection of poems, Bloodroot, was published in 1977 by

Place of Herons Press, whose editors explained in its Foreword that the general goal of

the collection was to help mold a new world of brother-, and sisterhood, breaking down

barriers between people and nations and reforging mankind’s ancient connections with

animals and with nature (iii). Interestingly, in the preface, James Cody compared

Villanueva’s writing to that of Whitman and Neruda, praising its masculine qualities: “At

first I thought she was a man or couldn’t tell. I realized she wasn’t and that her poems

were of the universal quality, embracing all subjects and passions, that seemed… to come

almost only from the writings of men” (i). Although Cody praised Villanueva’s text as an

exemplary piece of writing, it is easy to perceive the masculinist subtext underpinning his

assumptions. He continues, “In addition, there was no self-pity that is in so much of

‘feminist’ poetry. Instead there was a poet who took full glory in her reality as a woman

and yet saw, practiced and evinced no limitations because of that femininity. Instead

there was full acceptance of her womanhood with no self-defeating hatred of men” (i).

Despite the generally positive response to Bloodroot, Cody appears to perceive feminists

as angry, self-pitying women, less worthy of recognition than men. As he states later in

the text, “Alma Villanueva is not a feminist or a female poet, she is a poet taking on all

the responsibilities of that title” (i). It was against these patriarchal attitudes of both the

dominant culture and the Chicano Movement that Chicana authors started to write.

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Specifically, by focusing on issues of race and social class in addition to gender, Chicana

feminists differentiated themselves both from Anglo feminism and from the Chicano

Movement.

Regardless of Cody’s glowing appraisal of the book and his final focus on the

inner joy of the author, Bloodroot is a collection that connects the feminine with a

mythical creation story and its author’s self-actualized birth and coming of age. It has

autobiographical elements describing Villanueva’s growing up with her Mexican

grandmother and searching for a mother/father who had abandoned her as a child. This is

a far-cry from the celebratory tone Cody praises, and reveals Villanueva’s pain and

lifelong quest for what she had lost. Finding a meaningful connection with nature and

birthing herself as a poet completes her identity development and fills the vacuum she felt

earlier in her life. Villanueva is a survivor, whose life experience motivates her to search

for meaning and inspires her to write. As Tey Diana Rebolledo comments, “Great art

does not exclude social commentary, but indeed, is nourished and vitalized by it”

(“Soothing Serpents” 83). I would add to this that great literature often has a close

relationship to psychological events experienced by the author, which adds depth to her

work. Some of the poems in the collection stem from Villanueva’s personal experiences

of loss, abuse, and poverty. As Deborah Madsen puts it: “With the transformation of pain

through the transfigurative power of the literary imagination comes the rebirth of the

writer into a voice that is able to express defiance of patriarchal gender roles and

inherited modes of thinking, feeling, and living” (168).

The title Bloodroot has historical significance referring to a plant of the same

name, known by Native Americans to have curative power. Although it is potentially

55

toxic, Lesley Bremness explains that it has been used to treat a wide range of medical

problems from respiratory difficulties and skin problems to cancer (214). Since it can

survive and regenerate where other plants cannot, it stands as a symbol of survival.

Villanueva’s references to blood emphasize its life-giving and life-maintaining

properties. When asked in an interview by Frederick Luis Aldama about the significance

of blood in her writing, she said, “As for the blood image, it’s a very feminine image, as

in fertility. With patriarchy it’s been hijacked into a symbol of war/violence/domination:

blood” (291).

At the beginning of the book, Villanueva alludes to the collective origin of men

and women from the womb of ancestral Motherafrica, while also simultaneously bringing

to consciousness the importance of primordial elements of life and the alienation of

Western civilization from ancient natural wisdom. By establishing an early connection to

nature and her own indigenous roots, Villanueva moves beyond dualistic notions about

self/other and creates a third alternative through the use of an archaic, visceral imagery:

We fear the slip

into the fertile slime--

the embryonic ooze

too fecund

for the civilized nose

we were

collectively, together

born

out of

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motherafricas

womb. (Bloodroot 2-3)

Here the poet creates a myth of female origin, not unlike the male founders of the

Chicano Movement who related their ancestry to Aztec history and a lost paradise of

Aztlán, which was thought to have been located in the Southwest of the present United

States. According to the myth, as explained in the next chapter, Aztlán was the site of

plenty where the first Aztecs came from. In Villanueva’s text, nature has a significant

role as a life source. The origin of humanity is not tied specifically to Chicano history

but rather to a distant matriarch and mother of both men and women. In spite of their

common origin, Villanueva acknowledges a split between the consciousness of the sexes,

and the difficulty men have acknowledging their feminine side, which she associates with

the Earth. Villanueva asks, “…If man is out of touch with the Earth, how can he touch

woman” (Bloodroot 4). The poet’s reference to fertile slime appears to refer to an

intrauterine environment and embryonic stage of development, rather than a sexual act

between men and women. In fact, she acknowledges that we have grown fearful of

slipping into this “embryonic ooze” that existed before any organized structure. The line

arrangement of the end of the stanza changes with a separation of words, as if to

emphasize the collective birth from a common womb. Villanueva’s writing contradicts

traditional sexist notions about women’s bodies and bodily functions by giving a positive

meaning to concepts that were considered taboo or “dirty” such as menstrual blood,

womb and fertile slime: “Power of my blood, your secret/ wrapped in ancient

tongues/spoken by men who claimed themselves/gods and priests and oracles – they/

made elaborate rituals/ secret chants and extolled the cycles/ calling woman unclean”

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(Bloodroot 31). Accordingly, Elizabeth Jacobs states, “whereas Chicana sexuality and

female body were traditionally repressed by movement ideology, Villanueva celebrates

their potential as subversive areas of Chicana identity” (75). On a more abstract level,

Luce Irigaray makes a connection between fluids and women’s speech: “Woman never

speaks the same way. What she emits is flowing, fluctuating. Blurring” (This Sex 112).

According to Irigaray, form and the masculine have been privileged without taking into

account female difference. In Villanueva’s text, concrete bodily functions become

mythified and closely related to the fertility cycles of nature:

I grow heavy with the sperm

of trees,

with the nectar

of hummingbirds (listen to their

motor, purring)

with the journeying

wind, it

fills me

with tiny kisses cover

my eyes, my neck,

my leafy hair: roots. (Bloodroot 1)

Being part of the natural world gives the poet special knowledge and special connection

to the ancient plant and animal worlds, or rather the alchemy of nature through which her

(identity) development spins into motion. While she perceives blood as life-giving, roots

provide her with growth and form. It is as if they contained ancient wisdom: “My roots

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are wise; they love me but not too much” (1). Here, nature also has sexualized healing

power. The poet’s eyes are covered by the kisses of the wind as she grows “heavy with

the sperm of trees” (1). The erotic and the maternal are fused, as another way of

distancing the purely sexual act. As the poet clearly establishes parallels between nature

and woman, she draws a connection to indigenous beliefs and the native world view,

representing “a distinctively important feature in the works by Native American authors,

which denote plain, unadorned aesthetics, seeking to express mutual interdependence

inside creation, a world view that speaks for the harmonious relationship between

humans and nature” (qtd. in Pohjanrinne 15).

Furthermore, her invocation of fertility refers not only to pregnancy and human

birth but to a source of creativity (Ordoñez, “Body, Spirit” 61). As the author transforms

her female self, her identity as a poet begins to form. She becomes a myth maker, a seer

and a creator of a new world. According to Carmelo Virgillo and Naomi Lindstrom,

“Myth maker generates images larger than life and is capable of taking a powerful hold

on the human imagination” (1). In Villanueva, the creation of life and the creation of

poetry are principal acts of procreation and have the potential to result in a new world

order, that is more feminine and spiritual. Through creative acts the poet can take control

of her life and alter her reality:

A poet’s job

is to see

the contours of the

world and make

a myth to share

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for others to see

to make a reality;

a point from where the

world spins-

and if stubborn and persistent enough,

the point from where the

universe whorls:

right here. (Bloodroot 17)

Naomi Quiñonez talks about Chicana writers having “decolonized the body” by

touching on forbidden topics of sexuality: “As first wave Chicana writers began to

explore their sexuality in prose and poetry, they not only entered forbidden waters, they

dismantled the subject that trapped them in silence” (146). One way Villanueva

accomplishes this goal is by subverting religious concepts and giving them new

meanings. Thus, transformation of her self also means transformation of traditional

belief systems. When the poet laments her husband’s neglect of her need for love/sex,

she transforms the Biblical story of original sin into a birthing. Where in the Bible, Eve

tempts Adam by offering him a fruit from the Tree of Good and Evil, Villanueva’s poet

narrator seizes the opportunity to swallow the fruit, transforming it in her mouth, so that

she is able to give birth to herself. Ironically, she contrasts the death-inducing

consequences for Adam biting the apple and the role of woman, who is given the power

to mold the fruit and give birth:

I will swallow you whole and

accept and transform you

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till you melt (you/man only

in my mouth. bit the apple:

you must swallow

death-

I/woman give birth:

and this time to

myself). (Bloodroot 21)

The arrangement of the lines in two different columns left to right further emphasizes the

split between the poetic voice, man and woman, life and death, creation and consumption.

The first stanza starts with an assertion “I swallow,” followed by the transformation of

the fruit, which culminates in a pregnancy and the poet’s giving birth to herself without

the participation of a man. The “you/man” of the poem is presented as having no creative

power, and is reduced to being a consumer of the fruit and condemned to “swallow

death.”

Just as personhood and self-identity are closely tied to nature in Villanueva, so is

silence. Although many minority groups in the United States have been silenced and left

without a voice, in Bloodroot, silence takes on a different meaning. Being able to escape

and become one with the stone, acts as a shield against disappointment and loss,

maintains one’s continuity over time, and serves as a metaphor of Villanueva’s desire for

permanence. Being enfolded in the rock’s mineral core gives the poetic self a refuge

within the primal elements of nature and a durability that cannot be taken away by human

manipulation. In this context, silence is different from being silenced — it serves as a

protective armor beyond the cyclical ripening in the plant/animal worlds. Becoming part

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of a rock, when procreation and birthing are no longer possible, signifies the human

return to the original elements of nature, while leaving a permanent imprint in its very

core. Again, this stanza starts with an active gesture, “I take/ refuge” that negates the

stereotypical view of Mexican American women as passive bystanders in life. The poetic

self makes her own choices as she merges with the mineral core of the natural world:

I take

refuge in the

silence and permanence

of rock and stone,

its presence enfolding

me into its mineral core:

deep and beyond

the pregnancies and procreation

of animals and vegetation,--

stone is. (6)

In the autobiographical section of the collection, the poet acknowledges the rage

and bitterness she feels over her abandonment by her father, mother, and husband. And

although she is aware that the pain has been cast upon her by others, she accepts the fact

that she herself is feeding “the soil of bitterness” (Bloodroot 20). Villanueva’s early life

was characterized by loss and abuse. While she was curious about her mother’s sexual

desire and emptiness, she swore never to become like her, a helpless and needy

woman.5In this context, becoming part of the mineral core and permanence of a rock has

self-protective value. Her feminine identity has, however, suffered permanent scars.

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Never having experienced a “father’s desire,” the poet remains both attracted to and

repulsed by the desire she saw in her mother’s eyes:

I could weep and rage

against the man who never

stroked my child fine hair

who never felt the pride of

my femininity grow in his loins

never desired me in a secret fathers

way

the man who

dropped his seed in my mother’s

womb, then called it quits.

Her pain haunted me for years,

the way she looked when she

talked about him, the

desire and need that rose to her eyes-

it repulsed and attracted me. (Bloodroot 20)

The stanza starts with an angry “I could weep and rage” over the loss and abandonment

by a father who used her mother only for sexual pleasure and left without any sense of

responsibility or love for his little girl. Her own feelings, however, remain less defined

when she focuses on her mother. The poet identifies with her mother who was

disempowered by her own abandonment, and therefore experienced difficulty in her role

as a parent. She is very clear that as a child she took care of herself and grew up with a

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perseverance that she compares with the tenacity of a weed (Bloodroot 50). This sets her

up as different from others in her family and community, overtly less valued, but

possessing a capacity to survive, grow and take over. This gives rise to a sense of her

resiliency, both as a victim and a member of a minority community. She is in charge of

her own destiny and her development as a person and poet. No longer a hungry child, she

is creating her own identity within a feminine cosmos of nature and poetry. She calls

this identity “legendary,” again removing herself from everyday reality into a magical

world of myths:

I grew up like a thin, stubborn weed

Watering myself whatever way I could

Believing in my own myth

Transforming my reality

And creating a legendary/self. (Bloodroot 50)

While Villanueva does not focus on her Chicana origin, the section of Bloodroot that

describes her childhood and adolescence identifies joys and struggles of living with he

maternal grandmother. Although she feels abandoned in other close relationships, she is

especially attached to her Mexican mamacita, an important source of nurturing, life

lessons and a positive force that completes her identity development as a Chicana. The

child/poet is well aware of the difference between the tough rules of survival for

minorities in the Anglo-American world and the abiding of love she experienced from her

grandmother. In the end, the poetic voice proclaims her realization that securing material

goods through force and lies is not enough. She has finally internalized what her

grandmother taught her: that everything else in life passes, with the exception of love:

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Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii mamacita, Jesus,

I won’t forget my visions and

reality. to lie, to push, to get

just isn’t

enough.

(54)

The fact that the grandmother’s name is Jesus establishes her as a religious figure, a

Savior of sorts, who is likened to the Virgin Mother of the Bible, “eyes and hands lifted

up/imploringly and passionately/the vision and power/ offered to us” (Bloodroot 54).

Alejandro Morales points out that the mamacita is deified in the text as a representation

of supernatural forces, vision, and power, not necessarily as a Christian God but as Terra

Mater, the archetypical Earth Mother of indigenous mythology (125). Mamacita’s

statue-like image is also similar to that of the Virgen de Guadalupe, the indigenous

brown virgin of Mexican history. In this context, Villanueva confirms the importance of

grandmothers as caretakers, guides, and sources of inspiration. In the Chronicles of

Panchita Villa, Rebolledo refers to the negative criticism she received when focusing on

the role of abuelitas in Chicano literature, because she was talking about something that

“everyone already knew” (44). With the poets whose texts I am analyzing, however, the

grandmother figure has become internalized as the Mexican (or indigenous) maternal

figure who provides continuity of traditions and beliefs “across the borders” and remains

an important figure of identity development. Indeed, Rebolledo writes in “Abuelitas:

Mythology and Integration in Chicana Literature,” that grandmothers are often seen as

nurturing, comforting, and stable, linked to the home and their cultural place of origin, as

65

they prepare traditional Mexican food and speak Spanish” (150). Interestingly,

Rebolledo explains that the mother often has a different role, which produces conflict and

misunderstanding when she turns her back on Chicano cultural values in an effort to

assimilate within the dominant culture (149). While Villanueva focuses less on her

Chicano roots and tends to speak from a womanist viewpoint, her writing reflects the

importance of mamacita Jesus as a parental figure. Her mother is presented as a victim of

abandonment and deprivation, unable to nurture her child. As Patrick Murphy writes: “A

mestiza culture can draw on its grandmothers, from both sides of the border, and from

both sides of human lineage, to empower its people to end oppression and alienation and,

thereby recreate humanity in balance in its place” (“Grandmother Borderland” 38).

Like many Chicana border poets of her era, Villanueva also touches on the

problem of living on the edge of two countries, yet being a stranger in both. In her

“Mexican memos,” she writes about her grandmother and mother crossing into the

United States “unseen/unclaimed by either side” (67), referring to the invisibility and lack

of power from which border-crossers suffer in both countries. Neither woman has status

on either side even after immigrating. Villanueva’s solution is not to depend on anybody,

not to bow to a flag of either country, but to inhabit the feminine space inside herself.

This is clearly a refuge for her in a life filled with misery and trauma, and she finds both

peace there and the core of her feminine self: “I live in my womb, my beautiful womb/

And it flies no flag” (68). The retreat into her own body also speaks to the strength of her

identity as a woman while her Chicanidad appears more diffuse and manifested mostly

through early childhood memories.

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Lorna Dee Cervantes

Unlike Villanueva, Lorna Dee Cervantes has been identified as an “ethnic” poet

whose writing affirms her Mexican American identity (Seator 23). She writes from the

space of a young Chicana who grew up in a poor barrio in San Jose, California. Her first

collection of poems was Emplumada, published in 1981. This collection, more Chicana-

focused than Villanueva’s Bloodroot, is also a story of coming of age. While Villanueva

connects female identity to nature and a mythical self-birthing process from the

archetypal Mother Africa’s womb, Cervantes focuses on problems of class, race, and sex

as important influences on the lives of Chicano men and women (Wallace 6). The life

she writes about is often fraught with poverty, physical violence, rape, sexual abuse, and

teen pregnancy. Cervantes views herself as a political activist and “cultural worker”

(Madsen 198). However, against this social landscape of economic and racial

discrimination, male oppression, and crime, the poet paints more lyrical images of

pristine nature and the animistic world of her antepasados, who lived in close connection

to it. In a landmark analysis of Cervantes’ poetry, Marta Sánchez notes Cervantes’ focus

on her dual identity as a Chicana and a poet, a socially aware activist, and utopian

dreamer who “believes that social tensions can be reconciled by poetry” (Sánchez 86).

Much of her poetry, Sánchez argues, vacillates between these two poles and is intended

for two different audiences, Chicano and Anglo-American. The first group consists of

poems that speak directly about Chicano issues, for instance, “Beneath the Shadow of the

Freeway” and “Oaxaca 1974.” The second group of poems is more lyrical and does not

foreground the sociopolitical context (e.g. “Moonwalkers” and “Shells”).

The title of the collection, Emplumada, invokes feathers, or being covered in

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feathers. The writer translates this as “feathered; in plumage, as in after molting,” and its

masculine form plumado refers to a “pen flourish.” Throughout the book, birds (and

feathers) have a special place connecting the author to nature and to her Native American

roots. The notion of feathers also refers to the image of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent

god from Mesoamerican mythology. According to the Florentine Codex:

Quetzalcoatl -- he was wind; he was the guide, the roadsweeper of the rain gods,

of the masters of the water, of those who brought rain. And when the wind

increased, it was said, the dust swirled up, it roared, it howled, became dark, blew

in all directions; there was lightning; it grew wrathful.

And he was thus arrayed: he had a conical ocelot skin cape. His face was

covered with soot. He was adorned with [spiral] wind and mesquite symbols. He

had a curved turquoise ear pendant. He wore a gold neckband of small sea shells.

He bore the precious pheasant device on his back. He had ocelot skin anklets

with bells. He wore a cotton bone [ribbed] jacket. His were the shield with the

wind shell design, the curved [inlaid] spearthrower, and also foam sandals. (9)

While Quetzalcoatl was known in different parts of Mesoamerica, his character changed

over time, and he was considered in the Nahuatl cosmology to be one of the gods who

created the cosmos by separating the sky from the Earth; he could read the good and bad

signs in the calendar, reveal time, and hand down civilization, as well as predict human

destiny and find ideal kingdoms (Florescano 51-56). For the Aztecs, he was initially a

feathered serpent, associated with rain and fertility. He later became Quetzalcoatl, who

helped create humanity, controlled the wind and rain and founded agriculture and

industry (Wurtz 64).

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In contrast to the worship of a male god, Gloria Anzaldúa identifies with the

powerful female deity Coatlalopeuh, the fertility and Earth goddess, and Coatlicue,6

Serpent Skirt (Borderlands 27). She associates the serpent’s mouth with womanhood,

place of refuge and the most sacred place on the Earth: “Snake people had holes,

entrances to the body of the Earth Serpent; they followed the serpent’s way, identified

with the Serpent deity, with the mouth, both the eater and to be eaten” (34). There is,

however, an aggressive side to this goddess. Anzaldúa notes: “As the Earth, she opens

and swallows us, plunging us into the underworld where the soul resides, allowing us to

dwell in darkness” (68).

Based on the myths described above, Emplumada can be interpreted as a

feminization of the male god Quetzalcoatl, a symbol of resurrection and rebirth. On the

other hand, since she possesses a pen, like Villanueva, Cervantes speaks to her own

development as a poet, because Chicana women authors had long been denied the right to

write and publish (Rebolledo, “Tradition and Mythology” 106). Cervantes’ poetry also

raises questions about location, whether the north/south axis, city/countryside or

inside/outside. The birds she describes migrate from north to south, as does the poet

when she crosses the border. At the same time, she appears to locate her tools for writing

north of the border: “I come north/to gather my feathers/for quills” (47).

Although Cervantes is considered a Chicana poet, she questions her cultural

identity in a number of poems. In an interview with Ray González she discussed the

influence that her family had on her:

My grandmother had a connection to her indigenous side. A lot of the images in

my poems come from growing up with my grandmother who taught me that

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Chicanos are not separate from their Indian roots. Many of us refuse to admit this

fact. She taught me that things have a soul and speak to us. My numerous images

with birds, my ideas, the things I see in my poems--I capture them as they present

themselves, which is a gift my grandmother gave me. My mother spoke English

and was literate… I grew up hearing her records of poetry. Yes she was very

bitter. (González 8)

Thanks to her grandmother’s heritage, Cervantes developed a sensitivity to Native

American culture. However, growing up in Anglo culture and speaking the English

language severed her from her Mexican roots, as she indicated in a number of poems. In

“Refugee Ship,” she describes her alienation from Mexican culture most clearly: “Mama

raised me without a language/I’m orphaned from my Spanish name. The words are

foreign, stumbling/ on my tongue. I see in the mirror/ my reflection: bronzed skin, black

hair” (41). In Éscrits, Lacan writes about the importance of the mirror stage for

developing a person’s sense of self and subjectivity: “The jubilant assumption of his

specular image by the child at the infans stage … would seem to exhibit in an exemplary

situation the symbolic matrix in which I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is

objectified in the dialectic identification with the other” (2). According to Lacan, the

identification with one’s own image is also the image of the other, resulting in a split

when the recognition does not occur (Grosz 39, 40). Laura Gutierez Spencer explains:

“Entry into the symbolic consists of the child’s awareness of his role as subject of his

own discourse and as object of that of others. It would seem natural then, that Lacan’s

mirror stage occurs roughly at the age at which most children begin to speak” (70).

Cervantes’ poem addresses the split, when her dark-skinned mirror image does not

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correspond to her self-image, and she feels a profound sense of alienation. In the poem

“Oaxaca,” she talks about wanting to dye her thoughts brown to be able to match her

reflection in the mirror with her cultural/linguistic identity. However, the conflict

between language and what the poet sees in the mirror reflects not only her inner

difficulty of reconciling the difference within her, but societal conflict on both sides of

the border. In the United States, she is a Mexican; in Mexico she is a “bland pochaseed”

(44),7

a fake, who speaks and thinks like an American. In “Oaxaca, 1974,” the poet

continues: “My name hangs about me like a loose tooth/…Blame it on the old ones/ They

gave me a name that fights me” (44).

At the same time, Cervantes appears to be looking for her roots in Mexico but is

never fully able to resolve the problem of her self-image. Having grown up with English

as her mother tongue, she has incorporated much of the dominant North American culture

into her thinking and cannot find equilibrium. This speaks to the fragmentation and

multiplicity of the border subject. In her article “Making Familia from Scratch,” Norma

Alarcón explains that “the female speaking subject, who would want to speak from a

different position than that of a traditional mother is thrown into a crisis of meaning”

(221). This same crisis of meaning is true of Cervantes who cannot speak from the same

position as native Spanish-speakers in Mexico. Since for her, the language is the medium

that defines her as a poet, the conflict of identity is brought into question one more time,

when she describes how the children in Oaxaca greet her with glee, but how she is not

fully able to join them on the linguistic level. She writes:

Mexico,

I look for you in the streets of Oaxaca.

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The children run to me laughing,

spinning me blind and silly.

They call me in words of another language.

My brown body searches the streets

for the dye that will color my thoughts.

But Mexico gags,

¡Esputa!

on this bland pochaseed. (Emplumada 44)

Although the poet identifies with the children of Oaxaca and participates in their games,

in the end she is rejected by Mexico as a pastiche lacking authenticity as a Mexican. The

last stanza suggests that she was not only rejected but practically “spat out” as if she were

a prostitute. The stanza implies movement: “Mexico gags, ¡Esputa!” Gagging in this

context implies an effort to expel her, a kind of or choking, as if being suffocated by the

First World superpower. The poet herself explains the inherent word play in the glossary

of the book: “Esputa/Es puta — is a whore [escupa--spit]” (67). The reference to “puta”

can be construed as a reference to Hernán Cortés’ slave and translator, La Malinche,

maligned in the popular history as a whore who betrayed her people by helping Cortés

defeat the indigenous peoples of Mexico. La Malinche, then, becomes the negative side

of the split image virgin/whore. Ana Maria Carbonell reminds us that this split has led to

the common-place denigration of female agency in Mexican culture (56). Similarly,

Sandra Cypess states that La Malinche’s role was considered to be that of the supreme

evil while La Virgen represents supreme good in that culture (6). This sharp division can

72

be used to justify the behavior of men towards women. The relationship between Cortés

and La Malinche was that of a white conqueror and a subjugated Indian woman, and even

though new feminist interpretations focus on La Malinche as a language mediator,

translator, and mother of the mestizo race, the negative cultural model stemming from her

legendary image has been difficult to erase.8

In the poem, Cervantes is nothing more than

a “puta” whose brown body blends in with the Mexican population, but not her thoughts

and language. However, like La Malinche, she becomes a mediator, a translator of

words, who possesses the plumes to write with.

The denigrating vocabulary of Cervantes’ poem also reflects tensions in the

Borderlands and the problems of assimilation that make it hard for her to find a true

home. Alfred Arteaga writes about the difficulty of border-dwellers to become subjects

because “there is no metonymic link of nation, place, language, and identity” (94). Being

a Chicano, in his view, means a continual negotiation of difference (95). While

Cervantes is a Spanish-speaker, her poetic persona still experiences the clash of cultures

in language.

The first poem in her book, titled “Uncle’s First Rabbit” opens with a little boy’s

first hunting trip and his haunting memories of the dying rabbit. These merge with

images of his father’s violence, his mother being beaten up and his baby sister dying. The

boy yearns to run away from the traumatic memories and dysfunction of his family, only

to discover the impossibility of such erasure. Going to fight in a war deepens his trauma

and inability to run away. He continues the cycle of violence as he denigrates his wife,

even while watching her die. The poem lays the framework for problems of male

socialization, the history of trauma within the family and the impossibility of

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transcending such circumstances. The boy— an old man— is stuck in his past,

condemned to recreate his father’s history of violence in his own life. While men for

Cervantes are often an oppressive presence in the lives of women, in this poem she shows

how both sexes are trapped in the cycle of violence that is repeated across generations,

the same way as the internalization of sexist oppression.9

As with internalized racism,

this is the result of living in an oppressive, sexist environment, and internalizing the

negative stereotypes enforced by the society (Hipolito-Delgado 319-320).

In “Cannery Town in August,” Cervantes focuses on the monotonous sounds of

factory work and the inhumane, exploitative conditions in the canneries. In this work,

she wanted to highlight the urban experiences of Chicanas in the barrios of San Jose and

to write a “woman history of our raza” (2). The working women are described as

bodyless and speechless, lacking both an identity and a voice, made dumb by the sounds

of production, the noise of the machines in the cannery, and the noise of trucks outside.

This speaks to the harsh working conditions in the factories of industrialized countries,

and the higher value placed on production than on individual needs or conservation of

nature.

… I listen, while bodyless

uniforms and spinach specked shoes

drift in monochrome down the dark

moon-possessed streets. Women

who smell of whiskey and tomatoes,

peach fuzz reddening their lips and eyes-

I imagine them not speaking, dumbed

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by the can’s clamor and drop

to the trucks that wait, grunting

in their headlights below. (6)

According to the poem the workers leave their jobs with “spinach-specked shoes,”

smelling of tomatoes and with peach-fuzz reddened eyes, all signs of the hard labor that

has left its marks on their bodies and clothing. The female body is identified only as a

by-product of factory work: the smell of tomatoes, peach fuzz on the lips. The uniforms

that the women wear create an anonymity, which makes it is impossible to differentiate

one from the other. In addition, the poet singles out the smell of whiskey, perhaps from

nearby distilleries, but for some, alcohol could also have become their way of coping

with the harshness of cannery labor, negating the stereotypical view of Mexican

American women as dependent homemakers or virgin-like saints. The women in

“Cannery Town” work outside the home, participating in economic production and

industrial labor. The fact that they “drift down” late at night further removes them from

their stereotypical virgin-like position, placing them on the tiring nightly swing shift as

invisible actors in the global economy. The cannery itself and the factory production line

are represented as a masculine oppressor, involved in “the complete emptying of the

subject” (Jacobs 141). Symbols of masculine power include: the cannery “humping the

air,” “dumbing” the workers, and trucks “grunting” with their headlights on (6). Since

the moon is generally personified as a female entity (Biedermann 224), “the moon-

possessed streets” of the poem appear under masculine control, dark and lonely. Jacobs

points out that the poem highlights the alienation and invisibility of women who are

“confined to the shadows” (141). And further, “Cervantes wants to bring these women

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back to life but knows that poetry cannot deliver them from deadening experience”

(Wallace 8). Poetry can, however, raise consciousness about conditions in the cannery.

Historically, thousands of Hispanic women sought work in the food processing

industry in the 1930s. The conditions of labor were deplorable, consisting of long work

hours, unsanitary and unsafe work environments, sexual segregation and an unequal

division of labor. Women were not paid by the hour as the men were, but did piece work

as cutters and canners (Ruiz, Cannery Women 29). However, despite the tough

conditions, women’s labor “provided the safety net in their families’ day-to-day

confrontation with poverty” (9), sometimes giving the household the chance to acquire a

separate residence or to buy otherwise hard to afford “extras.” Although Cervantes

depicts the cannery women as voiceless, “dumbed” by the noise and oppressive

atmosphere, Mexican American women in California in fact established democratic trade

unions in an effort to improve their lives. Ruiz comments that their daily experience of

oppression, sexual harassments, and harsh work environments cemented their feelings of

solidarity (70). Again during this historical period, Mexican American women took an

active role in promoting change and did not remain passive victims of the “system.”

In the more autobiographical poems of Emplumada, Cervantes focuses on the

significance of family and friendships. Even in this context she does not steer away from

social problems, such as male violence, womanizing, and drinking. In “Beneath the

Shadow of the Freeway,” she contrasts the natural migration of birds with the imposing

structure of the freeway that runs next to a residential section of the city. Raúl Homero

Villa points out in Barrio-Logos that Freeway 280 divided idyllic suburbia from the more

urban Chicano neighborhood, disrupting the landscape and “reminding residents of their

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place in the spatial designs of the city” (227). The freeway also contrasts the

technological development of the city with the slowly disappearing natural environment

of the past. As a reminder of this, Cervantes writes: “Every day at dusk/ as Grandma

watered geraniums/ the shadow of the freeway lengthened” (Emplumada 11).

Against this landscape, the poet projects her own family history of three women,

each from a generation that has a different approach to the world. She labels her

grandmother as an innocent Queen, her mother as a fearless warrior, and herself as a

scribe who not only “translated Foreign Mail” (11) but also performed fix-up work,

traditionally assigned to men. The author positions herself in the interstices of border

life: she interprets “foreign” letters (from both sides of the border?) and formal

government documents to less literate family members, takes care of the house, and

functions as the male head of the family, thanks to her education and to her familiarity

with the English language. While the men attached to these women were violent,

sexually abusive drunks, women (especially her mother) developed a tough façade and

the coping skills to manage their lives on their own. The narrator’s grandmother,

however, is described as having an inner softness that made it hard for her to break the

cycle of violence. It is as if in her environment, only the birds were free and nurturing to

their mates, so rare in human relationships. The poet continues:

In California in the summer,

mockingbirds sing all night.

Grandma says they are singing for their nesting wives.

“They don’t leave their families

borrachando.” (12)

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And later:

She believes in myths and birds.

She trusts only what she builds

with her own hands. (12)

In these two stanzas, Cervantes juxtaposes different, if not contradictory,

sentiments. In the first, her grandmother appears to acknowledge with resignation

problems of male socialization, specifically drinking and violence, while contrasting

them with the behavior of mockingbirds. According to Deborah Madsen, birds have a

central place in the text not only as migratory animals, but also as representing the

reincarnation of indigenous deities, such as Wankan Tanka, Manitou, and Quetzalcoatl

(203), to name a few. In the second stanza, she is pictured as a more empowered woman

who is capable of taking charge and working with her own hands after “living twenty five

years with a man who tried to kill her” (12). According to the poem, the women of the

house were victims of domestic violence, sensitive inside, but with a cynical, mistrustful

exterior. The poet’s mother seems to have been especially hardened by her experience

and blamed her mother for her own victimization because she was too soft. “Mama said,

it is her own fault getting screwed by a man for that long” (12). Cervantes’ mother

reportedly insisted that the poet and her brother only speak English at home so that they

could escape the discrimination their ethnic group was subjected to. The text shows

Cervantes’ close connection with her grandmother — valuing her sensitivity, belief in

myths and nature, and concluding that she also will only trust what she herself builds.

The poet’s vacillation between the internalized image of her mother and grandmother,

and her subsequent identity confusion mirrors the fragmentation of the border zone; not

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knowing, as the epigraph shows, what truly is one’s land. The poet, however, reaches an

equilibrium through identification with the grandmother, as “in time, I plant geraniums/ I

tie up my hair in loose braids/ and trust only what I have built/ with my own hands” (14).

She appears to have been able to stop the generational transmission of violence: “Every

night I sleep with a gentle man /to the hymn of mockingbirds” (14). Wolfgang Binder

elaborates further on the meaning of the grandmother figure in Chicano poetry as a

“repository of oral, largely migrant history that transcends individual family history”

(138), which lends “coherence to a fragmented collective existence” (139). Thus,

Cervantes’ identification with her grandmother may function as a bridge between two

cultures and generations, mending the split she experienced in her Mexican American

identity.

The book ends with the title poem “Emplumada.” The poem refers to the end of

the summer, as snapdragons wither and change color. The poetic voice, now in third

person narrative, regrets the end of the warm season and the slow death in nature. Yet, in

this barren landscape, two hummingbirds “stuck to each other” are looking for last drops

of “what is good” before starting their migratory flight south:

…two hummingbirds, hovering, stuck to each other,

arcing their bodies in grim determination

to find what is good, what is

given them to find. These are warriors

distancing themselves from history.

They find peace

in the way they contain wind

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and are gone. (66)

While birds and feathers have important symbolic meaning for Cervantes, hummingbirds

are especially significant. According to Pérez-Torres, they may represent symbolism of

escape and transcendence. He draws from Nahua history the fact that the Toltecs did not

permit human sacrifice but instead, under the guidance of Quetzalcoatl, used small

animals such as hummingbirds for that practice (236). This changed when male deities,

such as the God of War, Huitzilopochtli, were introduced. As a result, Pérez-Torres sees

hummingbirds as representing opposition to male dominance. Cervantes borrows the

imagery, although she does not directly associate hummingbirds with matrilineal

heritage. Rather, she indicates that they are warriors who distance themselves from

history. They are free of domination and restrictions imposed by people. The poet

distances hummingbirds from the bloody past of the Mexica, recent wars and border

struggles, with the birds finding peace in the vastness of the sky, away from human

boundaries and constellations. They can migrate freely from north to south without being

constrained by border politics, immigration agents or geopolitical boundaries between the

two countries on either side of the border. The flight of the hummingbirds may also

symbolize the freedom that the author achieves as she starts her journey using their

plumage (quills) to create a borderless universe of poetry.

Pat Mora

Pat Mora is considered perhaps the most fronteriza of the poets studied in this

chapter. A native of El Paso, Texas, she grew up in an extended family with a very close

tie to her maternal grandmother and her aunt, whom she calls Lobo in her books. In an

interview with Héctor Torres, published in Conversations with Contemporary Chicana

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and Chicano Writers, Mora explains that having two languages at home was a blessing.

Unlike Villanueva and Cervantes she describes her family as loving. At the same time,

the experience of other less fortunate women was of interest to her. The poet continues:

“Persona poems like ‘Elena,’ is a poem that is trying to adopt the voice, or hear the voice,

of someone whose experience is very different from mine… so the voice of women of

Mexican heritage in this country, particularly those whose voices have not been heard,

became and remain a very intense interest of mine” (Torres 262).

Thus, the El Paso-Juárez borderland, a bilingual childhood, and a connection to

indigenous beliefs, as well as a growing sense of the inequities faced by Chicanos in the

United States, give rise to Mora’s poetry. Robin Riley Fast also finds a connection

between Mora’s work and traditional Chicano poetry. She suggests that Mora seeks

refuge in the images of the indigenous mother and Mother Earth, whom she depicts from

a strong feminist perspective:

She [Mora] affirms traditional Indian and Chicana women’s connections to the

desert, and redefines the desert as a fiercely independent woman; both actions

validate her as a Chicana poet and empower her to create. Her interest in

redefinition is also evident in her depictions of strong women who contradict

traditional Chicano notions of feminine propriety and who are clearly inspired by

nature, specifically, by the mother desert (30).

Furthermore, as Pérez-Torres points out in the epigraph to this chapter, the use of mythic

memory, typical of many Chicana poets, can be seen as a tool that helps construct a

cultural identity and forges a connection to previously subjugated forms of knowledge,

since it involves evocation of mythic figures of the past and reclamation of indigenous

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spirituality (16).

Mora’s first publication was a collection of poems titled Chants (1984), followed

by Borders in 1986. In this section, I will examine Borders thanks to its focus on the

Borderlands and conflicts that arise politically, socially and psychologically from its

location “in-between” (Bhabha, Location 7).10

While Mora identifies with the plight of

the less fortunate, she focuses on the healing power of nature, indigenous cultural

practices, and the wisdom of past generations. Her special interest in the desert and its

impact on the identity formation of women also merits attention.

Mora’s linguistic capability and use of code-switching further manifests both

connection to and separation from those who traverse the border regularly to work on the

other side, or those whose status in the United States is marginalized due to their ethnicity

or lack of citizenship. Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak talks about emblematic and linguistic

code-switching. The first involves use of Spanish words that are culturally connected to

ethnic identity, and the second has to do with the typical oral communication among

bilingual peers (106). Cordelia Candelaria points out how changing from one language to

another “conveys meaning quite apart from the lexical meanings denoted to the symbolic

meanings connoted by the surface language forms” (92). While the linguistic

interpretation of code-switching is interesting, its political and social meaning are perhaps

more important here. The frequent use of both languages suggests movement between

two cultural contexts and the fluidity of border identity. While code-switching has been

studied as a linguistic and aesthetic device in poetry, it has a close connection to

mestizaje,“in which,” according to Pérez-Torres, “a third language, a third possibility, ‘a

line of flight’ offers possibilities beyond simple dualisms” (215). He concludes that

code-switching manifests itself in continuous crossings of language, voice, and genre

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(216). The idea of crossing is central in Mora’s poems. She often places herself as the

poetic persona between two rooms, two distinct spaces that serve as lines of division

between the privileged and the underprivileged in the same way the geographic border

does. Mora uses code-switching sparingly to show border crossings between generations

and social groups. For instance, in “University Avenue,” she writes Spanish words to

describe what Chicanos inherited from their ancestors: hierbabuena, abrazos, cuentos

(Borders 19). Similarly, “Bilingual Christmas” starts with a clumsy use of Spanish

phrases, like Buenos días and hast luego, can be heard in Anglo boardrooms (21) that are

not accessible to poor Chicano families.

The second poem of Borders has a satiric tone and speaks to the desire of

immigrants to become American by assuming stereotypical aspects of the culture, giving

their children North American names in English and involving them in typical sports of

the United States:

Immigrants

wrap their babies in the American flag,

feed them mashed hot dogs and apple pie,

name them Bill and Daisy,

buy them blonde dolls that blink blue

eyes or a football or tiny cleats

before the baby can even walk,

speak to them in thick English. (15)

The poem also speaks to the issue of internalized oppression that has to do with assuming

negative societal attitudes towards one’s self, and results in devaluing the immigrant’s

own heritage in the effort to be all-American, as the poem reflects in the choice of names

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for their children, types of food and preference for white dolls. Espin talks about this

phenomenon as the first stage of ethnic identity development. During this phase, the

immigrant’s self-image negatively reflects the attitude of dominant society towards

populations that are different from the mainstream. In the process of change, this identity

moves towards a positive one after the denied parts of self-image are rejected (41). In the

poem above, Mora toys with these concepts, showing the ambivalence and anxiety that

many Latinos encounter in the United States, and ultimately the absurdity of forced

assimilation and ethnic self-denial.

Contrary to “Immigrants,” the poem “University Avenue” focuses on the social

heritage and indigenous traditions that have always nurtured Chicanas. While first

generation women have now entered university life with some trepidation, generally

coming from working class or economically deprived backgrounds, the poetic voice

says, they are guided into this new life by “gifts of the land” that their antepasados left

to them. Here, Mora draws a contrast between the newness and stifling atmosphere of

academia, and the natural environment, in which herbs, song, stories and close

relationships have always provided a foundation for life. In the end, the poet declares

that in spite of their isolation and uncertainty, Chicanas will be internally accompanied

by their ancestors and are, therefore, never alone:

Our people prepared us

With gifts of the land,

fire

herbs and song

hierbabuena soothes us into morning

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rhythms hum in our blood

abrazos linger in our bodies

cuentos whisper lessons en español.

We do not travel alone.

Our people burn deep within us. (19)

In several poems Mora refers to the dichotomy of border life and its impact on

identity formation. As in “University Avenue,” the poem titled “Sonrisas” contrasts the

difference between women with educated backgrounds and immigrant women from

Mexico who perform cheap labor “in the other room” (20). While schooling brings with

it concerns about budgets, tenure and curriculums, fine clothing, and polite smiles

according to the proper etiquette, the Mexican laborers are characterized by warmth,

laughter and their natural demeanor. In the first room, a clicking sound comes from cups

holding black coffee and in the other from the stirring of sweet milk coffee. This

juxtaposition contrasts the blandness of middle-class, educated life, and women being

more concerned about their weight and appearance, than the Mexicans with their own

cultural customs — chatting, enjoying fresh tamales and milk coffee sweetened with

sugar. The poet defines her life “in a doorway/between two rooms” (20). She clearly

identifies with the women from the dominant culture, but still has access to Mexican

culture through the doorway and through her heritage. At the same time, the poem

implies distance. The narrator peeks into the other room and identifies with what is going

on, but remains outside the group.

While the two sets of women in “Sonrisas” lead parallel lives in two separate

rooms with little contact with each other, Mora’s “The Grateful Minority” speaks to the

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problem of many Mexican Americans who become maids and perform low-paying tasks

in the U.S. economy, such as cleaning bathrooms, scrubbing, and polishing, with

gratitude over regular paychecks. The poetic voice highlights the otherness of these

maids with the interrogative “Ofelia who?” between the stanzas, indicating that they are

nameless and often unnoticed laborers within the dominant culture. And although she

questions how these women can be content under such circumstances, she concludes that

they possess the endurance of desert flowers, a survival mechanism she would like to

have:

Like desert flowers you bloom

namelessly in harsh countries

I want to shake your secret

from you. Why? How? (22)

Another aspect of oppression is described in the poem “Bilingual Christmas.”

Borrowing from a popular Christmas carol it starts with the question: “Do you hear what

I hear?” Ironically, the title speaks to the issue of language acquisition and how it seems

to have given Chicanas/os access to jobs in dominant society. This is, however, a faulty

assumption as bilingual individuals continue to be forced to adapt to American ways and

are valued only to the extent that they “add slight South-of-the-border seasoning” to the

corporate Christmas party. The reality of their community consists of whimpering voices

and “children too cold/ to sing” (21). Both the English and Spanish languages of the

poem are halting, as if to imitate non-native speech and the artificiality of such

communication. The final oppressive act comes from the immigration agents:

Not twinkling lights

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we see but

search lights

seeking illegal aliens

outside our thick windows. (21)

This reminds us of on-going enforcement problems along the U.S.- Mexico border. As

José David Saldivar explains in “On the Bad Edge of La Frontera,” the border machine

constructs subject positions to benefit North America. Migrant border-crossers are

labeled illegal and denied their human rights (263). As mentioned before, economic

turbulence often influences attitudes towards foreign labor. In “A History of

Chicanos/Mexicanos Along the U.S.-Mexico Border,” Oscar Martinez points out that

massive unemployment in the United States during the Great Depression led to a push to

get rid of workers who were perceived as foreign. This resulted in the “repatriation” of

about 500,000 Mexicans, many of whom were U.S. citizens (270)

Similarly, the economic downturn during Barack Obama’s presidency and

increasing anti-immigrant attitude within conservative groups has resulted in some states

proposing laws that would cut aid to the so-called “illegals” and tighten up border control

measures. For instance, California Proposition 187 in 1994 was state legislation,11

the

goal of which was to deny undocumented immigrants public services, access to schools

and even health care. More recently, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer ordered state

agencies to deny driver’s licenses and public benefits to undocumented immigrants.

While a big part of this law, known as SB 1070, was overturned by the U.S. Supreme

Court, a provision was left standing giving the police the authority to ask people whom

they stopped for proof of their immigration status. In its initial version the bill made it a

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crime for a person not to carry his or her immigration papers as proof of U.S. residency.

Also, through the Secure Communities provision, Prince William County in Virginia

maintains similar legislation, authorizing its police to check the immigration status of

anybody arrested for a crime. Although these legislative initiatives have occurred in

more recent years, the status of undocumented immigrants certainly has not improved

since Mora wrote the poem “Bilingual Christmas.” If anything the search lights of the

Migra are a reality for more people than before in the Chicano and wider Latino

community, adding to their fear and oppressive conditions under which many still live.

On the other hand, Mora uses the theme of the desert and hardy desert flower in

many of her poems to signify endurance and life. She finds herself at home in this

environment, to which she returns in her verses. Her desert women are strong, used to

tough living conditions, perhaps austere on the surface, but beautiful when in bloom. The

desert itself has feminine and maternal qualities. In “Traditions and Mythology,”

Rebolledo comments that the power of landscape transmits a sense of identity in Chicana

writing (123). This power can be seen in Mora’s poetry. In fact, her connection to the

land is so intimate that Patrick Murphy calls her sensibility “ecological multiculturality”

(“Conserving” 68). This notion also brings to the fore questions about eco feminism,

which links nature and culture, the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women

(Murphy, “The Women” 23). Greta Gaard and Murphy explain how the ideal

relationship between humans and nature involves physical, psychological and spiritual

embeddedness in nature (3). In her poetry, Mora focuses on the interrelationship between

nature and women. This can be seen, for instance in “Success,” in which she writes about

hierbabuena as a “stubborn green weed” (Borders 88) that “scents the desert air” (88) and

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provides comfort for women who “savor old ways” (88). Similarly, in a poem titled “Mi

Tierra,” Mora establishes a symbolic connection between the poetic persona and the hot

desert sand. Murphy also points out that Mora’s concept of mestiza is tied to

conservation of nature and ecology because “humans are part of the natural world” (“The

Women” 27). Much of early Chicana poetry makes this same connection and draws

comfort from it. It is another form of in-betweenness that Pérez-Torres refers to in the

epigraph to this chapter.

In the poem “Desert Women,” Mora focuses on the theme of survival, presented

here as an adaptation to a harsh natural environment:

Desert women know

about survival.

Fierce heat and cold

have burned and thickened

our skin. Like cactus

we’ve learned to hoard

to sprout deep roots,

to seem asleep, yet wake

at the scent of softness

in the air, to hide

pain and loss by silence,

no branches wail

or whisper our sad songs

safe behind our thorns.

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Don’t be deceived.

When we bloom, we stun. (80)

The poem starts with a description of the hardening natural conditions that have forced its

female inhabitants to develop a tough skin, a protective measure against heat and cold.

The reference to cacti reinforces the notion of being able to live in an environment that

offers little nourishment, a condition that the poet seems to identify with, as she changes

from the third person pronoun to the first person plural. As Villanueva talked about

withdrawing into the natural core of stone, Mora focuses on the protective function of the

cactus’s thorns, while it sprouts roots inside the Earth. Although the poem describes

women’s close relationship with nature, its political and social context refers to the

silencing experience of Chicanas in dominant culture. This silence also means that the

history of pain is internalized within each person, not publicly dealt with or empathized

with: “… to hide pain and loss by silence/no branches wail/or whisper our sad songs…”

However, in spite of a nearly clandestine existence, the desert women remain observant,

develop their own internal resources for living and root themselves firmly in the ground.

It is as if silence and being unnoticed has positive effects, for they provide refuge from

society’s oppressive forces. In an interview with Torres, Gloria Anzaldúa also notes that

the creation of an imaginary inner space has helped her feel safe when the environment

itself was filled with danger (Conversations 125). Similarly, appearing to sleep but being

awake suggests that appearances can be misleading. The external thorniness and

quietness hide an observant eye and resistant strength. In spite of the sadness and

hardships the author attributes to Chicana life, the poem ends with an affirmative

statement about the stunning, unmistakable beauty of cacti during blooming season. This

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perhaps looks ahead to the blooming process of Chicanas and Chicana writers, as their art

reaches larger audiences.

Similar ideas are also expressed in “Now and then, America.” The poem itself

contrasts the artificiality of North American traditions with the natural life surrounding

native customs, and ends on a satirical note of full-fledged cultural criticism:

Who wants to rot

beneath dry, winter grass

in a numbered grave

in a numbered row

in a section labeled Eternal Peace

with neighbors plagued

by limp, plastic roses

springing from their toes?

Grant me a little life now and then, America. (33)

The poem starts in a North American graveyard, described as orderly with

numbered sites and marked under the title “Eternal Peace.” Far from providing a quiet

resting place, it is a lifeless place with plastic roses and bodies rotting under dry grass.

The arrangement of the graves follows linear Western tradition, although the graveyard

itself with its corpses can be seen as an abject space of decay. The poet continues to

describe the artificiality of life, symbolized by pin-striped suits, chains, and insanity. In

this suffocating environment the poetic voice is asking for “a little bit of life.”

This dullness is contrasted with Latino attributes of vibrant colors, long hair, and

expressive Spanish language, a difference that the dominant culture does not accept as

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equal:

Let me in

to board rooms wearing hot

colors, my hair long and free,

maybe speaking Spanish.

Risk my difference, my surprises.

Grant me a little life, America. (33)

The third stanza continues the same theme of natural life and freedom. Here the poetic

voice presents an idyllic image of her own grave, covered at one end by marigolds,

flowers of the dead, and a cactus at the other. The reference to Oaxaca speaks to the

Mexican roots of the speaker and reminds the reader of border crossings. In this stanza

eco-feminism’s postulate about human embeddedness in nature comes to fruition as the

speaker paints a rich image of plants, desert creatures, and birds embracing her grave site

after the death and enabling life to continue through poetry or Nahua “flower and song.”

The evocation of orange blooms and yellow marigolds makes a further connection to the

sun as a source of life:

And when I die, plant zempasúchitl,

Flowers of the dead, and at my head

Plant organ cactus, green fleshy

Fingers sprouting, like in Oaxaca.

Let desert creatures hide

In the orange blooms.

Let birds nest in the cactus stems.

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Let me go knowing life

flower and song

will continue right above my bones. (33)

While Mora focuses on the frontera more directly than Villanueva and Cervantes, all

three poets speak from the third space that Bhabha and Soja talk about. Each crosses the

border of ethnic origin, race, gender, economic privilege, language, and locality. Their

close connection to myths, nature, and indigenous cultural practices adds to the

complexity of the Chicana border persona.

Soja sees in borderland writing, especially that of Anzaldúa, a space of radical

openness because the bleeding wound, caused by friction between the First and Third

Worlds, forms a scab and merges the two into a third country (Borderlands 3). The

mestiza consciousness is manifestation of this third option.

Although much of the poetry analyzed here has the function of consciousness

raising and reclamation of Chicana identity, it also serves as a resistance to the patriarchal

views of both the dominant society and the Chicano Movement. Chicana poets attempt

to rewrite the official history that has contributed to the denigration of Mexican

Americans and labeled women as “putas” and “vendidas,” when they express ideas that

oppose traditional views. Pérez-Torres echoes these sentiments: “When dominant

society configures the Chicano as an outsider instead of a constituent, a foreigner instead

of an American, a labor force instead of a complex human being, an awareness of the

limitations and delimitations of social discourses grow” (130). Chicana writers bring

gender inequality to the discourse on the Borderlands.

Since many of the poems discussed in this chapter are coming of age narratives,

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they highlight positive and negative aspects of growing up in a Chicano family. Men are

often depicted as abusive drunks, insensitive to women’s needs, while grandmothers are

accorded a very special place as transmitters of culture and feminine models of

identification. It is as if the poets can see in the mirror image of their abuelitas their own

desired Chicana reflection. And while the poems move between the old and new, myth

and current material reality, it would be a mistake to see them solely as idealizations of

the natural life of the past. As Villa points out: “I would, instead, characterize the

resilient agriculture as a symbolic figure and women’s horticultural practices as a cultural

model, of adaptation, and survival in the present, not just remembered in another place

and time of el pueblo” (223). Indeed, the poems speak to the resiliency and survival of

women, even in the face of poverty, abuse, and abandonment.

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Notes 1

Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism, explains that carnalismo of the Chicano

Movement focused on male brotherhood and the belief that it was important for

men to have public roles while women were to serve mostly as their support in the

private sphere, 136. See also Alma Garcia, Chicana Feminist Thought, regarding

the connection between machismo and the development of Chicana feminism, 5.

2 Roth asserts that the loyalists of the Chicano Movement accused Chicana

feminists of vendidismo or being sell-outs to white Anglo feminism, which they

saw as a threat. They supported traditional gender roles as part of Chicanismo

while the feminists argued that more egalitarian roles would be advantageous in

the political struggles of the movement by strengthening the “family,” 176.

3 See Hewitt for criticism on the metaphor of “waves of feminism” for its

stereotypical and hegemonic portrayal of the different time periods in the

women’s movement.

4 Mary Daly (1928-2010) was a radical, lesbian feminist whose book

Gyn/Ecology (published 1978) was criticized by Lorde for its narrow focus on

patriarchy and gender oppression.

5 In This Bridge We Call Home, Ana Louise Keating explains that Anzaldúa’s El

Mundo Zurdo or Left-Handed World is a visionary place for people of diverse

backgrounds and needs who work together for revolutionary change. She points

out that through this vision Anzaldúa rejects oppositional politics of difference

and brings forth a relational approach (520).

6 Villanueva explains in a later poem: “…I didn’t like fish/ I just liked to fish-/

and I vowed/ to never/ grow up/ to be a woman/ and be helpless/ like my mother”

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(Bloodroot 50). However, changing her voice to an adult voice she acknowledged

that it took guts for her mother just to keep standing.

7 See Borderlands for Anzaldúa’s notions regarding the Coatlicue state. There

she emphasizes Coatlicue’s Earth Mother symbolism, and her life giving and life

taking power. She associates her archetype to the underground aspect of her

psyche (46). The author translates pocha seed as an assimilated Mexican

American

8 Cypess considers La Malinche to be a root paradigm or a cultural model that is

reinvested time after time within the social drama (La Malinche 7).

9 Espin explains that oppressed men may displace their anger on children and

women, because it is the only way to recover their power (52). See also Carlos

Hipolito-Delgado, “Exploring the Etiology of Ethnic Self-Hatred: Internalized

racism in Chicana/o and Latina/o College Students” (Journal of College Student

Development 319-321).

10 Homi Bhabha explains, in The Location of Culture, the in-between as a space

between past and present. It renews the past and innovates and interrupts the

performance of the present.

11 This was the first time in California history that the state, instead of the federal

government, passed legislation related to immigrants. This has been followed by

similar efforts in Arizona, Virginia and Georgia in recent times.

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CHAPTER THREE

Chicana Visions Here and Beyond: Our Lady

Like other performances, the writing of history

is framed as a bodily practice… Bernardo P. Gallegos, “Whose Lady of

Guadalupe?”

The borderline work of art demands an encounter with “newness”

that is not part of the continuum of past and present; nor is it a

“newness” that can be contained in the mimesis of “original and

copy”… Such art does not merely recall the past as a social cause

or aesthetic precedent, it renews the past, refiguring it as a

contingent “in-between space” that innovates and interrupts the

performance of the present. Homi Bhabha, “Beyond the Pale: Art

in the Age of Multicultural Translation”

In this chapter, I will discuss the work of three prominent Chicana visual artists,

Ester Hernández, Yolanda Lopez, and Alma Lopez, and their controversial renditions of

the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I will focus on the latest piece by Alma Lopez

(Our Lady, 1999), which invokes the previous Guadalupana works but expands the

notion of the subject through queering the image of La Virgen de Guadalupe. I am

especially interested in how Alma Lopez’s imagery of the Madonna challenges existing

sexual, racial, religious, and national frontiers, positioning her work in the interstices of

her own Chicano culture and that of the dominant culture. I suggest that the images

created by the artists evoke what Alicia Gaspar de Alba calls embodied aesthetics,

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meaning that Chicana artists do not necessarily express their attachment to place, as did

their male counterparts when claiming Aztlán as their lost home, but have a more

intimate, bodily connection to it: “Instead of dispossession, ownership, or reclamation of

a place outside the self, embodied aesthetics uses the body as a signifier of place” (127).

Accordingly, the body itself becomes a site of origin, as I showed in the poetics of Alma

Villanueva in the previous chapter. Since the artists in question created their

Guadalupana pieces during distinct moments of history, I place the work of Ester

Hernández (La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los Xicanos, 1975),

Yolanda Lopez (Guadalupe Series, 1978) and Alma Lopez along a temporal continuum

as feminist contestations to the sexist politics defining Chicana women. Finally, this

chapter explores the connection of Guadalupe’s bodily inscription in art and theories in

the flesh.

Arts and Chicana Empowerment

Visual art has had a significant role in Chicano activism and cultural expression.

Rooted in the history of the community and the Chicano Movement, art became a tool

through which Chicanos expressed their struggles for improved political, economic, and

social conditions (Eckman 19). Also, as explained by Judith Baca, art had an important

role in affirming Chicano cultural identity and making the reality of its people visible

(CARA 21). Rodolfo Acuña echoed similar sentiments:

Defense of this community is through retention of culture: collective liberation

instead of individual co-optation. This is the message of the Gutierezes,

Gonzaleses and Tijerinas as they bid good-bye to the forces that have controlled

them in the past. The Chicano people seek self-determination in what were

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formerly and rightfully their lands, not those of “Anglo-America.” (CARA 21)

This progress toward self-determination, however, did not happen without

conflict, and as in the case of many minority liberatory movements, it did not easily gain

acceptance. According to Judith Baca, by bringing their particular reality to the forefront,

by resisting marginalization and assimilation, and by using art to engage in larger social

struggles of the time period, Chicanos became “an irritant in the mainstream vision”

(CARA 21). This was not necessarily a negative project, because it increased awareness

of Chicano politics and arts. Consequently, Chicanas whose works to a great extent had

been made invisible in the U.S. landscape of creative expression were able to begin to

challenge the hegemonic ideas of “a singular American culture” (Gaspar de Alba,

Chicano Art 31), opening for themselves a path into the mainstream discourse. At the

same time, it was hard to gain equal status, as Chicanas often utilized in their art a special

vernacular aesthetic, rasquachismo, that grew out of the every day experiences of the

community, especially of los de abajo (Ybarra-Frausto 156), and used whatever material

was readily available to create art. Tomas Ybarra-Frausto explains that rasquachismo

“draws its essence within the world of the tattered, shattered, and broken: lo remendido”

(156). Although popular among Chicanos, this “stitched-together” aesthetic was not

valued among the mainstream schools of creative expression. At the same time, much of

Chicano art can be seen as a working-class production that, as Gaspar de Alba suggests,

functions as an alter-Native culture, “which is both indigenous and alien to the United

States,… whose identity has been carved out of a history of colonization and struggle”

(Chicano Art 15). While Gaspar de Alba developed this concept when analyzing art

productions in the 1990 CARA (Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation 1965-85)

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exhibition in Los Angeles, alter-Native culture also appears to be a fitting label for a

more general study of Chicano art. As pointed out in previous chapters, the Mexican

American populations, although native to the U.S. Southwest, have often been given an-

Other if not “foreign,” status by the dominant society. Even though their symbolic

straddling of both sides of the border can be an asset since it gives Chicanas/os, like other

marginalized peoples, a sensibility that helps them understand the world in a broader

context, “outside in and inside out” (hooks 149), it can also subject them to

discriminatory practices.

Tracing History from Aztlán to the Virgin of Guadalupe

In “El desorden, Nationalism, and Chicana/o aesthetics,” Laura Pérez points out

that Chicano cultural practices have operated as a paradox in the dominant discourse, “bi-

discursively… from both within and without the oppressive ideological territories of

‘Occupied America’” (19). “Occupied America,” of course, refers to Rodolfo Acuña’s

groundbreaking history of Chicanos, as well as to the U.S.-Mexico War, which led to the

annexing of nearly half of Mexico to the United States, an invasion that, as noted

previously, not only produced serious losses for Mexico but also serves as the origins of a

distinct Mexican American community in the Southwest (Pérez, “El Desorden” 21).

Following a long history of oppression, displacement, and identity crisis, it was important

for Chicanas/os in the 1960s and 1970s to create a space that was specifically theirs. In

this context, Aztlán can be seen as “a nation within a nation” (29) that enabled them to

envision a common foundation from which to construct a Chicano identity. As a

symbolic construct, Aztlán has often united all the Chicanas/os culturally and spiritually

(Leal 8) in the United States. It was used as an ideological platform in El Plan Espiritual

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de Aztlán,1

and first made public at the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in

Denver in 1969. The third paragraph of the plan declares:

Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time

has come and who struggles against the foreigner “gabacho” who exploits our

riches and destroys our culture. With our hearts in our hands and our hands in the

soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people

with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all

our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free

pueblos, we are Aztlán. (Anaya and Lomeli 1)

As seen above, El Plan de Aztlán, usually referred to as the Plan, focused on building a

mestizo nation of autonomous pueblos mexicanos with a separate economic system,

comprised of Chicano commerce, free of European capitalism. According to Yolanda

Alaniz and Megan Cornish, the Plan defined the Chicano struggle as a movement for

national sovereignty; its other demands were for equality in their U.S. homeland,

independent political governance, economic self-determination, culturally specific

curriculum in the schools, and community self-defense. The Plan advocated for bilingual

education and, on the whole, emphasized racial solidarity (193). While the Plan focused

on the founding of a specific “bronze culture” across the lands that the Anglo American

invaders took from Mexico in 1848, it borrowed from the myth about the original home

of the Aztecs in the North before their departure to new territories and new riches.2

At

the same time, if we understand the notion of Aztlán, as did Daniel Cooper Alarcón, to be

a palimpsest of competing narratives that have been superimposed over earlier ones,

never quite erasing them fully (4), we begin to see a multilayered construct of cultural

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and national identity that has been modified over time and across cultural boundaries,

acquiring new significations in the course of history. To explain the concept of

palimpsest, Cooper Alarcón theorizes:

If we remember that definitive characteristic of the palimpsest is incomplete

erasure and superimposition, and we begin to look for this characteristic in

uncharacteristic sites, we begin to locate the palimpsest as the nexus of power,

empire and discourse. (4).

This is an especially useful construct, since much of what we know about Aztec origins

was re-told and re-interpreted by the indigenous elite and the Spaniards after the

Conquest. The palimpsest approach also challenges drawing strict boundaries between

history and myth and enables competing narratives and different voices to be included

(7). Cooper Alarcón also suggests that reading Mesoamerican history this way, against

the master narratives of the dominant group, helps to address issues that have hitherto

attracted little attention. The multilayered concept makes it possible to understand

Chicano identity as a result of the interrelationships between Chicano and Mexican

cultures, different ethnic groups, multiple geographic origins, and diverse historic/mythic

pasts.

Historically, although the facts have been much debated, Aztlán was considered

the home of the Aztecs approximately until the eleventh century A.D. when they left and

started their journey south towards the valley of Anáhuac. In 1325, they settled there and

established their temple at Tenochtitlán,3

in what is now known as Mexico City.

According to early narratives, such as the Codex Ramírez, Aztlán was a paradisiacal

place of “whiteness” that existed in the north and was surrounded by water. Seven

calpulli (clans) lived there in seven caves around a curved mountain (Pina 28). It was a

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place of plentitude, according to the chroniclers. Fray Diego Durán’s The History of the

Indies of New Spain describes Aztlán in the following way:

In that place there is a great hill in the midst of the waters, and it is called

Colhuacan because its summit is twisted, thus it is Colhuacan, meaning “Twisted

Hill.” In this hill there were caves or grottoes where our fathers and grandfathers

lived for many years. There they lived in leisure, when they were called Mexitin

[or Mexicas] and Aztecs. There they had at their disposal great flocks of ducks of

different kinds, herons, cormorants, cranes, and other waterfowl. Our ancestors

enjoyed the song and melody of the little birds with red and yellow heads (213).4

Although the Aztecs ultimately gained power that was to “radiate to the four

corners of the world” (Pina 28), at the time of their departure and during their

peregrination they had an inferior status. They were considered ignorant barbarians, and

remained initially unwelcome in the areas they tried to settle. During their migration,

however, the Aztecs conquered other tribes and city-states, acquiring both wealth and

knowledge of sciences such as astronomy, architecture, and agriculture, ultimately

gaining imperial power over the whole region. By the time the Spaniards arrived in the

New World, the Aztecs were seen as greedy colonizers by other Indians in the area

(Todorov 59). On the other hand, as Cooper Alarcón has pointed out, the Aztecs had a

tradition of assimilating the religious practices of other cultures (12), which helped them

to incorporate new skills and knowledge but seemingly also principles of Christianity.

After all, it was the Aztec religious belief system that originally sparked their journey

from Aztlán, under the guidance of their sun and war deity Huitzilopochtli, making it “a

pilgrimage directed by a supernatural being” (Pina 25). It is also worth noting that war

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and religion had a close connection in Aztec society. As reported by Miguel León-

Portilla, the religious goal of the Aztecs was to capture enough sacrificial victims for

Huitzilopochtli to satisfy his hunger for human blood. According to León-Portilla, it was

this ceremonial attitude toward war that can be seen as a decisive factor in the fall of the

empire (León-Portilla xliii). On the other hand, since the three motives of the Conquest

were economic, political, and religious, as Virginia Bouvier reminds us in Women and

the Conquest of California 1542-1840 (3), the Spaniards found it important to root out,

often with extreme violence, indigenous ritual practices that did not accord with their

Christian beliefs or Western world view. Among them, human sacrifice was used to

justify aggression of the colonizers, as Hernán Cortés explained in a letter to Charles V:

One very horrible and abominable custom they have which they certainly should

be punished and which we have seen in no other part, and that is that whenever

they wish to beg anything of their idols, in order that their petition may find more

acceptance, they take large numbers of boys and girls and even grown men and

women and tear out their hearts and bowels while still alive, burning them in the

presence of those idols, and offering the smoke of such burning as a pleasant

sacrifice. (qtd. in Schwartz 83)

Although the Spanish Conquistadores benefitted from partial erasure of Mexican culture

in order to build their power structures upon indigenous institutions (Cooper Alarcón 4),

most of Tenochtitlán was destroyed. Thus, as mentioned before, the recording of

historical facts was left to a great extent to lay chroniclers and Spanish clergy, whose

interpretation of events, customs, and religious ceremonies was tainted by their own

values and understanding of history. It was even harder to find out about earlier periods

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and peoples, because the Aztecs themselves had destroyed their books and rewritten their

history after the establishment of Tenochtitlán, most likely to recreate a past that was

more in tune with their newly acquired power. Investigators have pointed out that, in

general, Mesoamerican societies altered history to reshape it for their present

circumstances, because they believed that it was a repetition of past events (Gillespie

xxiv). For instance, Roberta and Peter Markman have emphasized that myth was always

used to re-interpret history, which in return became the realization of myth (270).

Consequently, as the anthropologist Ross Hassig points out, in the accounts of the

Aztec migration from Aztlán “history merged uneasily with myth, increasingly so as one

goes back in time” (112). It is therefore hard to separate fact from legend, and many

historians still disagree about the location of Aztlán or whether it ever existed. The myth

known today shares similarities with other “creation stories” in its depiction of Aztlán as

a place of abundance and a utopian existence. Interpreted symbolically it can be seen as

the maternal womb (seven caves) from which the Aztecs emerged before starting their

peregrination to their promised land. Susan Gillespie points out that according to one

interpretation of history, all ethnic groups were believed to have descended from a

primordial couple, Iztacmixcoatl and Ilancueitl. They were said to have lived in

Chicomoztoc (also called Aztlán), which was considered the legendary womb of many

groups of people around the Valley of Mexico (57). These interpretations are important

because they suggest a maternal imagery that was later shunted aside by a patriarchal

ideology.

What does this mythical history really have to do with twentieth century

Chicanos? Is it a re-creation of an idyllic homeland where “injustice, evil, sickness, old

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age, poverty, and misery did not exist” (Leal 8)? How did the myth of Aztlán affirm a

political agenda of resistance and allow Chicanas/os to claim a new identity during a

period of political turmoil? What is Aztlán’s connection to Chicano art? To answer these

questions, I will first point to the notion developed by Rudolfo Anaya that spiritual

yearning for a homeland appears to be inherent in the collective memory of any group

(239). As Anaya points out, this longing has to do with the need to identify one’s origin

in order to name oneself. For Chicanas/os the idea of the lost homeland in the U.S.

Southwest gave impetus to their political agenda and the establishment of a distinct

identity. Aztlán, then, can be seen as a symbol that has multiple meanings. It is not only

an ancestral land of displaced peoples but also can be understood more broadly as the

spiritual and psychological center of cultural mestizaje, which, in John Chavez’s words,

can be applied “to any place north of Mexico where Chicanos hoped to fulfill their

collective aspirations” (qtd. in Cooper Alarcón 33). Also, Chicanos in the mid-1960s

identified with Aztec history because it spoke to the loss of their original home,

migration, struggle for status, and establishment of power, before being brutally crushed

by the Spanish conquerors, who “took the lands,” “exploited the riches,” and “destroyed

the culture” of the Mexicas. These concepts resonated in El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a

manifesto against Anglo Americans, who were seen as the more recent colonizers of the

U.S. Southwest in the aftermath of the War of 1848. Land then became a trope that

connected with the Chicano psyche and its longings: it signified loss, exile, and the need

to re-conquer what had been taken away. Interestingly, if the land is personified as a

female,5

the Spanish Conquest of the New World and the Chicano desire to re-possess the

lands of the U.S. Southwest can be seen principally as male endeavors. Further, Gaspar

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de Alba talks about place-attachment, which she views as a process sustained by “an

affective tie to the land and to the community that has occupied, used, and cared for the

land since time immemorial” (“There’s No Place” 113). Aztlán, then, is an ideal of a

place connected to ancestral memory, and to Chicanos’ masculinist attachment to their

roots.

As indicated above, many investigators point out that as a construct Aztlán

combines history, mythology and a search for meaning. On the other hand, while the

Conquest and the Christianizing of the New World historically resulted in the destruction

of Pre-Columbian religious icons and belief systems, according to Anaya, Aztlán can also

be seen as a place of synthesis that was influenced by the Old World traditions, Indo-

Hispanic religiosity, and the spirituality of the pueblos (239). One example of this was

the merging of the Virgin Mary of the Spanish Catholic faith and the indigenous goddess

Tonantzin, resulting in the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who was believed to have

appeared to a Christianized Indian, Juan Diego. Declared the Patroness of Mexico City

in 1737, she became an important Mexican national symbol. The spiritual transition to

the new religion was made easier by the fusion between the two female deities: “The fact

that the European Mother God had power over fertility, disease, and natural disasters,

facilitated syncretism between her and the native mother goddesses” (Peterson 40). The

process was not, however, always as smooth as the clergy would have wished. For

instance, in the 1500s, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590) complained in his

Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España that the natives came to the Church of

Guadalupe to worship their old goddess Tonantzin, an act that he considered “a satanic

device to mask idolatry” (Wolf 35). Stafford Poole, who has analyzed many original

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documents, does not find any evidence that Sahagún knew about the apparitions to Juan

Diego but rather interpreted the indigenous worship as a revival of pagan devotion (80).

Overall, the Christianity practiced by the Aztecs needs to be understood within their

cultural context, since it was built on their own religious beliefs and thought patterns

(Vieira Powers 52). After Sahagún’s investigation, there were only brief mentions of the

Virgin of Guadalupe until 1648 when the theologian and preacher Miguel Sánchez wrote

about the miracle of her appearance. Jacques Lafaye is of the opinion that it was Sánchez

who “invented” the Mexican Guadalupan tradition, providing it with a theological

foundation that was based on earlier anecdotal evidence and the description of the

Woman of the Apocalypse in the Bible (244-245). The images that Sánchez evoked in

his writings recalled the Book of Revelation: “And there appeared a great wonder in

heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a

crown of twelve stars” (Rev. 12.1). And later: “The woman was given the two wings of a

great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the desert where she

would be taken care of for a time, times and a half time, out of the serpent’s reach” (Rev.

12.14). Sánchez saw in the Conquest a re-enactment of the apocalyptic battle, and when

Montezuma’s empire fell, giving way to Christianity, he saw Mexico as God’s chosen

“sun-planet” where the Virgin Mary was to appear in the image of Guadalupe (Brading

59). It is of interest here that Sánchez wrote from a criollo perspective, which explains

the popularity of his text after it was revised for much later publication. The idea of a

new homeland where the Virgin of Guadalupe had the role of “our criolla sovereign”

(Poole 104) was one of the central motives for Sánchez’s religious work. Again, we see

the yearning for a homeland and a political investment in gaining a favorable status in the

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Americas as one of the founding principles of Sánchez’s work.

Even today, the image of the Virgin is so powerful that the anthropologist Eric

Wolf called her the master symbol of Mexico, a symbol that “encompasses the hopes and

aspirations of a whole society” (34). As indicated above, she has been venerated since

the early seventeenth century as the Queen Mother of the Americas. In 1629, her image

was carried from Tepeyac to Mexico City to save it from floods, which had been a

serious problem since the Aztec period. Similarly, in 1737, it was believed that the

Virgin had intervened during an epidemic of plague. The Virgin of Guadalupe has often

been seen as a symbol of liberation. In 1810, during the War of Independence, her image

was used for the insurgent movement. Later, both Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa

fought the Revolutionary War of 1910 under her patronage. In the United States, César

Chavez used Guadalupe as a symbol for the farm workers’ strike in the 1960s. Wolf

asserts that the Virgin provokes two distinct imaginaries: she is perceived, first, as a

source of maternal warmth and infantile longing for “a pristine state in which hunger and

unsatisfactory social relations are minimized” (36) and, second, in the context of Mexican

male domination, as having the power to rebel against the father, that is to subvert

patriarchy. These images correspond to two types of kinship relations that Wolf observed

in Indian and Mexican families. Yet, in the context of the Conquest the meaning of

Guadalupe takes another form. Jeanette Peterson, while not dismissing the importance of

Guadalupe as a symbol of liberation, argues that it was imperative for the criollo program

in the New World to verify the apparitions as a genuinely American phenomenon to

justify the conquest and to glorify Mexico (42). She views Guadalupe also as an emblem

of control and submission. This is especially true within the masculinist context of the

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Catholic Church and the meanings it has attached to the Virgin.

Broadly speaking, it is possible to see in Guadalupe both a political figure for

Mexican nationalism and a religious icon, associated with Catholicism and popular

beliefs. In addition, her image has been used to set a standard for female behavior.

Researchers have long discussed the character traits attributed to the ideal (read virginal)

woman in the Mexican imaginary: she is submissive, asexual, morally superior, self-

sacrificing, sad, and humble (Stevens 94). Unlike her negative counterpart, La Malinche,

the Indian woman who served as a translator and concubine to Cortés during the

Conquest, Guadalupe symbolizes purity. However, to fully understand the meaning

attached to Guadalupe, it is important to look at two other female archetypes. As

indicated previously, myths surrounding the image of La Malinche or Doña Marina, as

she was known to the Spanish during the Conquest, implicated her as the fallen woman

who betrayed her people by leading Cortés to victory over the Aztecs. In The Labyrinth

of Solitude, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz labeled her as the violated mother, la

Chingada, representing all Indian women who bore the signs of violation “in their very

flesh” (86). The myth surrounding her figure has had such profound cultural impact that

according to Sandra Cypess, it continues to be a paradigm for female conduct, and for

relationships between men and women (7). The fact that the female image has been split

between two polarities reinforces a virgen/puta dynamic that sets the stage for male

domination of women. The third female archetype is La Llorona, who, according to a

popular legend, was an Indian woman who had born children to a married Spanish man

of higher status. When rejected by him, she drowned her children and killed herself.

From then onward, she was said to walk at night near bodies of water crying for her lost

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children. Although the myth has many versions, and appears to have European roots, its

similarity to Indian legends gave it a place in the Mexican tradition (Limón 408). One of

its indigenous versions was reported by Sahagún, who explained that the Aztec goddess

Tonantzin (one aspect of whom was called Cihuacóatl)6

was believed to appear dressed in

white attire in a crowd of women leaving behind the cradle of her child, and a piece of

flint with which to make a spear point for human sacrifice (qtd. in Lafaye 212). Limón

argues that this and other similar legends inform Indian versions of the narrative, to

which the Europeans then added other motifs (408). Most interesting for the present

analysis is that the splitting, made possible by the Guadalupe/Malinche nexus, is often

addressed in Chicana feminist cultural production. In “From Llorona to Gritona,” Ana

María Carbonell discusses the antecedents of this split from the colonial period on. The

Aztecs, in their demand for sacrificial victims, manipulated the role of Cihuacoatl as a

patron of midwives, and replaced her child with a sacrificial knife, turning her into an

agent of destructive forces and a bad mother (Carbonell 55). Consequently, as a

descendant of Coatlicue, she was separated from her siblings Tonantzin and Coatlopeuh,

the good mothers (55). Cihuacoatl can therefore be associated with La Llorona.7

Within

this context, La Llorona, La Malinche and the Virgin of Guadalupe can be understood as

a trinity of legendary female figures whose images have been distorted by a masculine

interpretation of history, and whose presence lives on in the works of many Chicana/o

artists and writers.

Chicana Artists, Chicana Subjects

As mentioned previously, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán was a product of masculine

imagination, since the Chicano Movement tended to exclude women as equal partners.

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Gaspar de Alba among other feminist critics asserts that the myth of Aztlán has been at

the core of the Chicano male identity affecting the Chicano psyche and cultural

production, and forging sexual politics into its ideology and representation in the arts

(“There’s No Place” 104, 105). The artistic expression of Chicanos was dominated by

men until the mid-seventies, with women primarily depicted as spouses, mothers,

goddesses and sex symbols (Nixon 1). It was no coincidence that in 1977 Sybil Venegas

described in the November issue of La Gente the celebrations of el Dia de los Muertos as

an art tradition that would play a significant role in strengthening the Chicano Cultural

Renaissance. She predicted that,

As more and more communities become increasingly aware of these currently

existing and well-established celebrations, it is no doubt that many more such

events will begin to take place in other communities in the near future. And as

more groups borrow and exchange ideas of similar nature, Chicano communities

throughout the Southwest will experience a cultural renaissance of unique

proportions (15).

Although the Day of the Dead was already an important cultural event in East Los

Angeles and other Chicano communities, it is curious that Venegas saw it and other

similar celebrations as the tradition that would project the influence of Chicano arts on a

larger scale. Even though Chicana artists presented their altar work at Día de los Muertos

museum exhibits, critics argued that because their work was relegated to a single annual

festival of Latin American origin, it could serve to marginalize their creative input (Pérez,

“Writing” 54) reinforcing their position and cultural production as the exotic other. It

was not until the year 2004 that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art began

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discussions about how it could house permanent exhibitions of Latino artists (Pérez-

Torres 235).

On the other hand, also in 1977, Venegas wrote an article for Chismearte, in

which she claimed that the time was ripe for Chicana artists to participate in creative

production: “No longer bound to the conceptual chains of passivity or obliged to recreate

the image of la Virgen de Guadalupe on a daily basis, Chicana artists have emerged as

successful and talented counterparts to Chicano artists” (4). This declaration speaks

clearly of a shift from the stereotypical behavioral code for women, associated with the

Virgin, and changing sex role expectations, as Chicana feminism started to emerge and

develop new strategies to challenge the masculine discourse. As suggested by Laura

Pérez, Chicanas wanted to occupy their own space in the Chicano Movement, sharing in

but also transforming the vision of Aztlán and becoming participants in la Causa (“El

desorden” 23). This desire was expressed poignantly by the poet Margarita Cota

Cárdenas in a poem:

He’s very much aware now

and makes fervent Revolution

so his children

and the masses

will be free

but his woman

in every language

has only begun to ask

- y yo querido viejo

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and ME? (qtd in Infinite Divisions 22)

The poem shows the vacuum in which many Chicanas were left when their men

joined forces with the Chicano Movement. In an article titled “And Yes. . . The Earth

Did Part,” Angie Chabram-Dernersesian explains that Chicanas consciously disassociated

themselves from male hegemonic constructions of group identity during the 1970s,

striving to reclaim a subject position by “parting with male-centered ethnic qualifiers that

inscribed Chicana subjection” (41). According to Chabram-Dernersesian, this meant

situating themselves in Aztlán, while rejecting male domination and sexism. Part of the

process of redefinition emerged through creative works that replaced old female icons by

new empowering images and new subject positions, because one of the goals for Chicana

artists was to overcome oppression. As Judith Huacuja writes, this was an undertaking

that involved exposing all the imperialistic strategies that disempowered and devalued

Chicanas as women and members of their ethnic group (105).

These deconstructions of Chicanismo were important, not only because the

Movement left women out of its ideology of liberation, but also because it created a

(unified) male subject within a monolithic concept of Chicano nationalism that left no

room for sexual and gender differences. El Plan very clearly stated that, “Brotherhood

unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come...” (Anaya

and Lomelli 1). Furthermore, it borrowed somewhat uncritically the concept of Aztlán as

the mythical site of Aztec origin, ignoring the bloody history of the Aztec imperial

acquisitions. As Pritchard points out, Chicanismo utilized “a symbol that has served the

Mexican state and its ideological apparatuses of repression and oppression” (24).

Although Aztec women had a parallel status with men in matters of labor and enjoyed

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equal legal rights, this changed quickly under Spanish rule, resulting in gender inequality

that persisted in Mexico through the colonial era, and beyond. Thus, the

Aztec/Mexican/Chicano connection was articulated in ways that were problematic for

women, in spite of the fact that many first-wave feminist writers and artists were inspired

by the Movement’s cultural ideals (Quiñones 131).

Lifting the Veil of(f) the Virgin: Ester Hernández and Yolanda Lopez

Anna Nieto Gómez, an early Chicana feminist wrote a proposal for Chicana

education that identified a need “to lift the veil of the Virgin’s face to show a real woman

who is not exempt from the trials of life” (“The Chicana”131). The recognition that the

image of Guadalupe had very little in common with flesh-and-blood Chicanas resulted in

numerous attempts to depict her in a different, perhaps more contemporary way. The

notion that the material realities of Chicana life, for instance, skin color, place of birth,

conditions of growing up, and sexual orientation should be at the center of the production

of politics and of theory, was voiced by Cherrie Moraga in This Bridge Called My Back

in 1981. Moraga proposed her theory in the flesh, in which women of color named

themselves and bridged the contradictions of women of color among white feminists,

lesbians among straights, and feminists in the patriarchal culture (23). She argued that

theory in the flesh would lead to healing.

In her image titled La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los

Xicanos (black and white etching, 1975, Figure 2), Ester Hernández stirred up both

interest and discomfort. In her more life-like rendition of Guadalupe, Hernández depicts

a Virgin, dressed in a karate-uniform standing on one leg as she launches a powerful

sidekick. In stark contrast to Hernández’s action figure, the traditional rendition (Figure

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1) depicts Guadalupe as a passive but beautiful olive-skinned female, whose hands are

frozen in prayer and eyes downcast in silence. She is dressed in a red robe with a floral

pattern, cloaked in a blue mantle decorated by gold stars, and she is supported by a small

winged angel. She stands on a crescent moon with the rays of the sun forming an oval

halo around her. As a holy woman, she appears silent and far removed from the world

around her. The downward cast of her eyes hides them from the viewer, shielding her

demure gaze. In traditional paintings her eyes appear closed as in humble meditation.

This image of Guadalupe radiates purity: she is nuestra madre, holy and asexual. As

suggested earlier, like the Marianist construct of Aztlán, she has come to symbolize

maternal nurturing and protection.

In contrast to the traditional image, Hernández’s Virgin is a black-belt warrior

who is fiercely fighting for Chicano rights, focusing her gaze on her opponent and

clenching her fists. She no longer represents the ideal, submissive woman but is

transformed into a feminist action figure, now in a position of gender equality and

activism. Her leg is aimed straight at the other side of the aureole. Since her reach is no

longer limited by the confines of what is usually viewed a sign of divinity, Hernández

invites redefinition of both the religious icon and consequently of stereotypical gender

roles, from which the historical image draws. She depicts the Virgin as a strong, brown

woman in the act of eloquently springing off the crescent moon, no longer needing to be

“held in place” (Pérez, “El desorden” 34) by the angel underneath. Hernández’s figure of

a male cherub, does not have the conventional neutral expression but a look of awe,

stretching his arms upward. The star-decorated mantle of the Judeo-Christian tradition is

in the background, as if the karate fighter had cast it off as an impediment to her active

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stance. In essence, she seems to be indicating that she is as capable of fighting for la

Raza as her male counterparts. The karate uniform places her within the dominant

culture, no longer subjugated because of her gender, race, and class but in a position of

parity. Although the mestiza features of the Virgin are clearly depicted, her gender is

more ambiguous. thanks to the karate suit, perhaps indicating that this Guadalupe is

confident in traversing the world of both sexes and different cultures, in the same way as

Anzaldúa’s new mestiza who “has a plural personality” and “operates in a pluralistic

mode” (Borderlands 101). Yet, her stance subverts the traditional image of femininity, as

she clenches her fist and gives a powerful kick. In Judith Butler’s terms, the performance

of the warrior Guadalupe can be understood as scripting a new self: more active, more

aggressive. The elimination of many gender-markers provokes questions about their

partial erasure, inspiring the viewer to ask whether sexuality was not of interest to the

artist during this time period or whether she wanted to leave it open for new possibilities.

In Gender Trouble, Butler talks about gender as an identity that is socially

constituted. She writes:

The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence,

must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements,

and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This

formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model

of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social

temporality (140-141).

This raises the question of whether, in addition to being a bi-cultural, feminist

Chicana, Hernnadez’s Guadalupe is also seen fighting for lesbian rights. Previously,

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Hernández did not comment on the topic, when told that in her piece, La Ofrenda, the

halo and the figure of the Virgin resembled a vagina (Yarbro-Bejarano, “The Lesbian”

185). But as Emma Pérez asserts, “to queer the border is to look at the usual documents

with another critical eye” (“Queering” 128), thus filling the gaps and including sexuality

in the narratives of the Borderlands. We can also question to what extent this karate

Virgin may have paved the way for a more clearly queer Guadalupe connection in

Hernández’s La Ofrenda. At the very least, the karate image is reminiscent of the self-

defense classes that were offered to women in the heyday of the feminist movement, to

empower them so that they could protect themselves from victimization by men. The

warrior Guadalupe appears not only capable of defending herself but also fighting for the

rights of her community. Thus, Hernández connects the individual struggle for liberation

to the collective struggle for equality and recognition, within her Chicano raza.

Emma Pérez views the whole notion of Chicano nationalism as “a return to the

pre-oedipal mother whose symbolic equivalent of Aztlán moves back in time, as a

regression, a return to the mother, but the mother cannot be Malinche. She must be

Virgin of Guadalupe; she cannot be sexual” (Decolonial 122). According to Pérez, the

history of Chicano nationalism relies on a pre-oedipal maternal imaginary of Aztlán that

splits the Chicana identity by erasing the possibility of female sexuality for the sake of

virginal purity. Luz Calvo develops this idea further, asserting that Chicano nationalists

relied on relations of patriarchal power and the incest taboo as they tried to structure

Chicano identity towards compulsory heterosexuality (“Art Comes” 207).

Importantly, Hernández’s Virgin like other creative work must be seen in the

perspective of the time and political context in which it was created. Shifra Goldman

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talks about the function of art in time-space continuum, and the need to consider where

and for whom a specific piece was created (282). Although the idea of Guadalupe as a

karate fighter was thought to be insulting by some Chicanas/os and even incited bomb

threats after its publication, it is now considered a signature piece of Hernández’s

generation (Mesa-Bains 137), which called for feminist participation from all Chicanas

after a period of repressive gender ideology. In that sense, it was a contestatory work of

art that challenged the mainstream and Chicano patriarchies. In the artist’s own words,

The figure represents woman becoming an active participant, breaking out of

some traditional images — the colonial mentality, while maintaining her

culture, informing, teaching and learning from her people; taking a militant

stand on all fronts, on behalf of La Raza: La Chicana at the forefront of the arts,

in schools, as writers… (Quirarte 21).

Similarly, Yolanda Lopez is known for her Guadalupe series. An activist

involved in the farm workers’ struggle, helping organize a barrio health clinic, and

participating as a court artist at the trial of Los Siete (the seven) political activists,

accused of killing a policeman (LaDuke 104),8

she became interested in visual

representations of women after seeing a slide show sponsored by Women against

Violence against Women, a grassroots organization founded in 1976 to protest violence

and displays derogatory to women in the mass media. Concerned by the ways that

mainstream magazines objectified and victimized women, she began to explore visual

material produced during the Chicano Movement, finding a scarcity of female images

apart from stereotypical images of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Stott 56, 57). She

consequently became interested in transforming the meanings attached to the Virgin:

As for the movement media, the Virgin of Guadalupe was the most prevalent,

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continuous image of women… so I looked at this religious icon of the Virgin,

who was the symbol of Mexican nationalism, to see what it did for us as women.

She was a role model; that was what public images do, they feed us back a way

that we should be, a way for us to compare ourselves to what we are. (Martinez,

“Artist” 18)

Teresa Eckman also notes in her analysis of Chicano and Neo-Mexicanist art that the

official iconography of Guadalupe has remained unchanged, in its numerous

instantiations since the mid-sixteenth century. Her glance is cast downward, her hands

meet in prayer, and she stands on a crescent moon supported by a winged angel, wearing

a red floral robe. She is covered by a blue mantle, and rays of sun surround her body (7-

8). The original image in the basilica in Mexico City portrays many of these

characteristics of Guadalupe: hands in prayer, radiant light as a sign of the Immaculata,

crescent moon indicating her grace, and a posture suggesting humility and obedience

(Davalos 87).

Challenging the conventional rendition, Lopez created her triptych (oil pastel on

paper, 1978) depicting the Virgin in everyday situations, as a working-class woman who

earns a living by sewing, as a grandmother, and as a marathon runner. According to

Karen Mary Davalos, in A Ver: Revisioning Art History, the triptych challenges

traditional gender constructions, attitudes towards race, and the patriarchy of the Catholic

Church, and explores Chicana subjectivities (86), as Anzaldúa did when she wrote about

the new mestíza consciousness. The artist herself found it comfortable to work with

photographs since she was trained as a photographer. She also found it disconcerting that

the Chicano Movement produced pictures of male heroes, such as César Chavez and

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Zapata but not of women (Martínez, “Artist” 18). The Virgin of Guadalupe, besides

being an important religious emblem, signified conquest to her:

The last place of resistance of the Mexican Indians to Spanish colonization was

their spiritual life, their religion, which was not Christian. When that image of the

Virgin happened, it accomplished the conquest. It combined the indigenous great

mother earth, and a Christian icon. That was its function: a tool of the conquest.

(qtd. in Martínez, “Artist” 18)

In Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe, Lopez placed her mother, a

middle-aged mestiza woman, on a chair behind a sewing machine stitching the star-

spangled cape that Guadalupe typically wears over her dress (Figure 2). A small male

angel sits on the floor, looking up like a child. His wings are the color of the Mexican

flag, and the roses that are usually associated with the apparition of Guadalupe to Juan

Diego are scattered next to him. Although initially hard to discern, there is a snake

wrapped around the sewing machine. This image brings Guadalupe into the real world of

working women, each of whom is as sacred to Lopez as the Virgin of Tepeyac. Davalos

reports that, in the eyes of Lopez as a child, her mother was beautiful, and therefore, her

portrait as Guadalupe sets a new standard for female beauty that is not tied to age or

youth (91). Her mantle is the result of hard work, and the snake that is wrapped around

the sewing machine suggests the indigenous wisdom and power that Lopez attributes to

ordinary women and their labor. The image of the serpent can be understood as a trace of

pre-Colombian pagan religions, and perhaps the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, “Serpent

Skirt,” the mother of the other deities, and in the meanwhile, also fulfills the practical

(and ironic) function of a pin cushion. The male angel does not support the Virgin as in

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the conventional images, but sits on the crescent moon partially covered by the cloak that

Guadalupe is sewing. Although he can seen as a child, resting safely at the Virgin

Mother’s feet, he is also a masculine reminder of the Chicano connection to the Mexican

nation state.

A second portrait, Victoria F. Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe, features an older

woman sitting on a stool, draped with the Virgin’s cloak (Figure 3). She is centered in

front of the aureole with a flayed snake in one hand and a knife in the other. This time

the angel is pictured behind the Virgin, holding a garland of flowers in the air. One of his

wings is visible and carries, again, the colors of the Mexican flag. In this picture, Lopez

depicts her grandmother as Guadalupe, presented as an older woman with the divine rays

of the sun all around her. She is wearing a dress that is decorated by a pin with a tiny

crescent moon, which no longer serves as a pedestal of her holiness but rather as a simple

adornment and possibly as a reminder of her feminine connection to the moon cycles.

Rather than being supported by the male angel, she has her feet firmly planted on the

ground while the angel is hidden half-way behind the stool. The wreath of flowers he is

holding up could be a garland of roses to honor and celebrate the Grandmother-Virgin.

Holding a snake that she appears to have killed not only gives this Virgin control over the

animal world, but also reconnects her to the goddesses of her indigenous heritage, and

metonymically arms her with power over cycles of birth and death, sexuality, and

womanhood itself. Coatlicue, the Serpent Skirt, has generally been understood to

represent duality of life, as Anzaldúa points out:

Coatlicue depicts the contradictory. In her figure, all the symbols important to the

religion and philosophy of the Aztecs are integrated. Like Medusa, the Gorgon,

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she is a symbol of the fusion of opposites: the eagle and the serpent, heaven and

the underworld, life and death, mobility and immobility, beauty and horror.

(Borderlands 69)

For Anzaldúa, spiritual mestizaje is a critical part of Borderlands identity. She states that

Chicanas/os are people “on the knees of the gods” (103). This is to say that the heritage

of old Aztec gods and goddesses underlies their psyche, integrated by the figure of

Coatlicue.

Thus, as in Lopez’s image, the grandmother evolves as a figure of wisdom and

authority in whose person the dualities coalesce. Her image becomes even more

powerful if we consider that Serpent Skirt symbolized the “complete cosmos” (Markman

and Markman 223). The fact that the grandmother has flayed the snake is also

reminiscent of the Aztec ritual practices during which a revered victim was sacrificed to

the god (Markman and Markman 181). Flayed alive, his skin was taken and worn by a

priest who became the god. Markman and Markman emphasize that the important

element of sacrifice was the transformation of the victim into a god whose “physical body

functioned as a ritual mask in making the inner reality outer, spiritualizing the physical”

(181).

Thus, the flayed snake in Grandmother Guadalupe’s hand can be understood as an

embodiment of her regenerative powers, as in the Aztec traditional death ritual, the

killing that made new life possible (Markman and Markman 4). If we interpret the

primitive flint knife as a tool of sacrifice, then the grandmother can be seen to occupy a

divine indigenous position, with a close connection to the deep layers of the Aztec

spirituality. Lopez herself says that the snake was part of the Virgin’s iconography in her

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own church in San Diego, where a statue shows the Virgin standing on a globe and

trampling a snake (Davalos 92). She also pointed out that, additionally, the snake

symbolism refers to sexuality, which she appears to treat with some ambivalence. The

snake as pincushion and the flayed snake, possessed by Guadalupe, lack potency and are

perhaps ironic allusions to indicate that the male sex is now dominated by a woman. The

artist explains further:

The snake is flayed. It symbolizes end of life. She is holding the knife herself

because she is no longer struggling with life and with sexuality. She has her

own power. It is neither sad nor celebratory. (qtd. in Davalos 93)

Overall, this Guadalupana depicts a mestiza who is used to working with her

hands, an image missing in the original Plan Espiritual de Aztlán because of its

masculine focus on brotherhood. Nevertheless, for Lopez, this type of an omission

served as an inspiration, as the aesthetic goal of her work was to confront those historical

distortions about women that placed them in inferior positions; Lopez wanted “to make

Chicanos think” (Martínez, “Artist” 14) and to act as a provocateur who helps her

audience to become more aware of the power inequities that Chicanas face and to

empower them.

In the last painting of the triptych, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of

Guadalupe, Lopez transposed her own image onto the Virgin (Figure 4). In this painting,

she is wearing tennis shoes and a pink dress that reveals her muscular legs as she leaps

gleefully towards the viewer off her pedestal-moon. The cloak is hanging loosely over

one of her shoulders, and she is holding a snake in her hand as a sign of sexual power.

The rays of the sun surround her while she steps over the angel whose wings now display

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the colors of the U.S. flag. Interestingly, Lopez described the angel as a “middle-aged

agent of patriarchy” (Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art 141), and as such a member of the

dominant society. On the other hand, it seems that he is not only a symbol of male

patriarchy but also the colonizing power of the United States, as indicated by the red,

white and blue symbolism.

Critics have disagreed about the significance of this image. Many see U.S. colors

on the wings of the angel, as cited above. Laura Pérez, however, found a mixture of blue

and green in it, symbolizing the flags of both Mexico and the United States. This is an

interesting observation that adds strength to her argument that Lopez radically displaces

“the patriarchal and colonist underpinnings of the Mexican, Mexican American and

dominant U.S. cultures that have shaped the Chicana, in complex, gendered ways”

(Pérez, “El desorden” 35). Historically, turquoise was the color of Aztec royalty, which

adds to the interplay between past and present, evident in Lopez’s Guadalupana. As we

know, Chicana subjectivities cross over multiple national/transnational borders, making

possible a continuous process of identity formation across cultures and the creation of

new values, symbols and images that challenge the hegemonic systems supporting the

concept of a monolithic America. Guadalupe as a marathon runner is a strong, self-

directed Chicana who has agency and the convictions of an activist. Her cloak resembles

the cape of a superwoman, conferring on her extraordinary powers.

At the same time, the fact that the artist runner is holding a snake in her hand can

also be portrayed as a reference to Coatlicue, the ancient deity that according to Anzaldúa

resides in the underground part of the psyche (Borderlands 68). The liberating aspect of

her presence has to do with her function as an Earth Mother, who conceived all celestial

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beings and is the incarnation of cosmic processes, the goddess of life and death (68).

Hence, the empowerment of Chicanas is not only due to the re-interpretation of the power

of the goddesses but also to the new knowledge, hybrid consciousness, and the crossing

into a new territory that brings new awareness or facultad, the “capacity to see in surface

phenomena deeper realities” (Borderlands 60). That is also the function of the artist

when she seeks new connections and re-interpretations of history through her pictures.

Yolanda Lopez’s Guadalupe series reflects Anzaldúa’s notions about the mestiza

consciousness, the work of which is to “break down the subject-object duality… and to

show in the flesh… how duality is transcended” (Borderlands 102). The bodily

transformations of the Virgin place her in different socio-political environments,

broadening her reach and the meanings attached to her. Lopez has explained that one of

her motives for creating this series was her interest in the multiplicity of female bodies.

Importantly, the Guadalupe triptych consists of three generations of mujeres valientes,

and speaks to the importance of the family and interconnectedness of its female members.

This, however, is not the family of the Chicano Movement’s discourse but rather a family

of gendered female subjects who are no longer “subjected” (Chabram Dernersesian,

“And, Yes…” 41), but who along with their men “plant the seeds, water the fields, and

gather the crops” (Anaya and Lomeli, “El Plan Espiritual” 1) of their Aztlán.

Furthermore, if we agree with the historian Antonia Castañeda that “the story/history of

the individual and the community is constituted by, and inscribed on, the body of people

in that community” (“Que se pudieran” 123), Lopez’s work can be understood in the

larger social context. It is noteworthy that Chicana feminists, Hernández and Lopez

included, turned Guadalupe into an activist figure, as Guillermo Gómez-Peña points out

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in the much-cited volume titled Goddess of the Americas by Ana Castillo. Underlining

the overarching feminist symbolism that Chicanas have assigned to the Virgin, Gómez-

Peña sees her role in that discourse as similar to an activist of human rights struggling

against many societal injustices, for instance, “against racism, the border patrol, the cops,

and supremacist politicians” (180). In his view, among Chicana feminists, “la

Guadalupana stood defiant and compassionate as a symbol of female strength, right next

to la Malinche, Frida, Sor Juana, and more recently Selena” (Gómez-Peña 180). Thus,

Mexican-born Gómez-Peña brings to our awareness the multiple meanings and

contradictions ascribed to the Virgin as well as her politicized images, which have been

alien to the intelligentsia of Mexicans south of the border. On the other hand, placing her

on the list of famous women from both sides of the border both secularizes her and

punctuates her transnational mestiza character.

Most clearly, the Chicana Virgin represents what Chela Sandoval calls an

“oppositional agent” who occupies different identity, ideological, and aesthetic positions

(“Mestizaje” 360) in order to resist existing relations of power. Sandoval’s notion of

“subjectivity-as-masquerade” is especially appealing here due to the continuous play of

meanings that artists project onto the figure/body of Guadalupe. Sandoval views

oppositional forms of consciousness as tactics of transforming social relationships, and

specifically the subjectivity-as-masquerade as “a movement through, over, and within

any dominant system of resistance, identity, race, gender, sex, class, and national

meanings (“Mestizaje” 260), that interests me. In the Oxford Dictionary, masquerade is

defined as appearing in disguise or assuming a false appearance. The clothing details of

the many Virgin figures depicted by Hernández and Lopez “prick the eye” like Barthes’s

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punctum, a part object that has the power of expanding the vision (Barthes 45). The

changing apparel brings to mind an identificatory performance of a transvestite that

according to Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui always calls into question “the performance of the

original” (130). Here, I would like to invoke the term transvestism, not as a synonym for

crossing over to another gender space, but rather to another social location through

clothing and a bodily performance, an especially interesting notion when analyzing the

Guadalupana of Alma Lopez. As a result, the viewer feels compelled to ask which of the

Virgins is assuming a false appearance. Could it be that the original Guadalupe whose

sexuality as Tonantzin was cut off, first by the Spanish Catholic Church and later by the

national patriarchies, is the one we should question?

Alma Lopez and Her Queer Virgin

When Alma Lopez’s digital image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Our Lady (1999),

was displayed at the Santa Fe Museum of International Folk Art as part of an exhibition

titled “Cyber Arte: Tradition Meets Technology,” it created so much controversy that a

group of Chicanos as well as church activists demanded its removal. At the height of the

controversy in June 2001, Sarah King wrote a brief article for Art in America, stating that,

“… California artist Alma Lopez portrays the Virgin wearing a bikini made of roses; held

aloft by a buxom, bare-breasted angel, she gazes out defiantly.” This popular perception

of the sexuality of the image inflamed both politicians and the religious community. The

Archbishop of Santa Fe, Michael Sheehan called the picture “offending,” “sacrilegious”

and “tart” (Lopez, “Silencing Our Lady” 251), and nine legislators threatened to cut

funding for the museum. Although Lopez received critical acclaim for this print, she felt

put on trial. To her, rather than being offensive, the image signified the lived experience

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of Chicanas:

When I see Our Lady as well as works portraying the Virgen by many Chicana

artists, I see an alternative voice expressing the multiplicities of our lived realities,

I see myself living a tradition of Chicanas who because of cultural and gender

oppression have asserted our voice. I see Chicanas creating a deep and

meaningful connection to this revolutionary cultural female image that appeared

to an indigenous person at a time of genocide… (“Silencing Our Lady” 253).

Our Lady depicts the Virgin of Guadalupe as an attractive Chicana (Raquel

Salinas), whose upper and lower torso are covered by roses, as if by a bikini. Over it, she

is wearing a robe with images of the pre-Columbian moon goddess Coyolxauhqui. The

star-spangled cloak of the traditional Virgin forms a platform on which the whole

constellation stands. Rather than blue, it is greenish, taking us back to the Aztec roots of

the image. Guadalupe herself stands barefoot on a crescent moon surrounded by the

conventional aureole. Instead of the typical male cherub underneath, there is a bare-

breasted female angel (Raquel Gutiérez) whom Lopez calls “a nude butterfly angel”

(“Silencing Our Lady” 254). The angel is superimposed on a Viceroy butterfly whose

wings merge with her. For Lopez, the symbolism of the Viceroy is important because, in

order to survive, it mimics the poisonous Monarch butterfly, which is known to migrate

between the United States and Mexico equipped with a special genetic memory (“Alma

Lopez” 90, 91). Since the Viceroy pretends to be something (poisonous) that it is not,

for Lopez, “the Viceroy mirrors parallel and intersecting histories of being different or

‘other’ even in our own communities” (“Mermaids, Butterflies” 190). Moreover, as a

Chicana lesbian, the story of this butterfly was especially meaningful to Lopez, because

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she felt that like the Viceroy, homosexuals had been generally ostracized in the Chicano

community. Becoming something it (she) was not, was a strategy of survival for both.

Making a direct connection between her and the “queer” butterfly, Lopez writes: “The

Viceroy is part of the butterfly communities of Monarchs, Queens and Soldiers, and yet,

she is different. The Viceroy is queer. As a Chicana, as a lesbian, and as an artist, I am

different, I am queer” (“It’s Not About” 275).

Linguistically, the Spanish word for butterfly, mariposa, according to the cultural

critic Luz Calvo, also evokes the terms marimacha and maricón, which refer to female

and male homosexuals. Since the prefix “mari” is also linked to María (Mary) of the

Bible, it is possible to assign on the semiotic paradigmatic axis a queer meaning to

Lopez’s Virgin (Calvo, “Border Fantasies” 217). Other symbolic elements of the print,

such as the bare-breasted angel and the images related to the Aztec goddess

Coyolxauhqui speak to a connection between women across temporal, geographical, and

sexual borders. Furthermore Coyolxauhqui, the powerful daughter of Coatlicue, has been

adopted by many Chicana artists as a symbol of identity reclamation (Huacuja 110),

because she was mutilated and decapitated by her power-hungry brother Huitzilopochtli.

After he threw her skull to the sky she became the moon. Her fragmented body as seen in

sculptures came to signify, among other things, the indigenous body/spirituality torn apart

by colonizing powers in Chicana feminist thinking (Huacuja 110). Along these lines,

Anzaldúa talks about “putting Coyolxauhqui together” (“Now Let Us Shift” 558) and the

Coyolxauhqui consciousness (562) that has to do with reconstructing oneself with the

help of the goddess’s (moon)light:

Coyolxauhqui personifies the wish to repair and heal, as well as rewrite the stories

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of loss and recovery, exile and homecoming, disinheritance and recuperation,

stories that lead out of passivity and into agency, out of devalued into valued

lives. (563)

This is where Anzaldúa shows her optimism: it is possible to rebuild what was lost,

broken, and wounded through heightened awareness. And the process of healing happens

by mending the “historical indigenous/mestiza body” (Huacuja 111).

For Lopez also, Coyolxauhqui’s body “becomes a space re-membered and… a

terrain for sacrifice and remaking” (Huacuja 111). On the other hand, Lopez’s print

projects an image of wholeness, sexual agency, and confidence, bringing the power of

Tonantzin into being. In many ways, Our Lady represents what Yvonne Yarbro-

Bejarano calls the “lesbianization of heterosexual icons” (“The Lesbian Body” 182), and

as such brings forth in a subtle way the question of queer (or female) desire. The fact that

Lopez had been inspired by Sandra Cisneros’s essay titled “Guadalupe the Sex Symbol”

infuses her picture with libidinal energy. Although Lopez’s citation of Cisneros

primarily alludes to the problematic of gender and ethnic identification, the sexual

underpinnings of the image are there: “She is a face for a god without a face, an indigena

for god without ethnicity, a female deity for a god who is genderless, but I also

understand that for her to approach me, for me to finally open the door and accept her,

she had to be a woman like me” (Cisneros 50). Thus, we understand that, for Lopez,

Guadalupe is an object of identification: a woman, a mestiza, and a queer. When she

continues to describe how Cisneros in her essay muses about whether the Virgen had a

dark vagina and nipples underneath her dress, she explains that at that point she imagined

roses — Castilian roses — as a sign of her miraculous appearance to Juan Diego. The

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roses pictured, interestingly, are in multiple colors and not native to Tepeyac, which

speaks to the hybridity of this image.

Aside from the traditional symbolism of love and passion that the symbolism of

the red rose evokes, Lopez also addresses the mystery and multiplicity that surrounds the

persona of Guadalupe. If in Christian iconography, the rose is a symbol for Mary, Queen

of Heaven, and virginity (Biedermann 290), Lopez has revived Guadalupe as a

contemporary desiring Chicana, a transnational border-crosser, and racialized mestiza, in

whose body the indigenous, Mexican, and Spanish coalesce. In another detail, the print

shows a baby blue rose around the Virgin’s crotch. Unlike Cisneros, who wanted to lift

the Virgin’s dress to see “if she comes with chones, and does her panocha look like mine,

and does she have dark nipples too” (“Guadalupe Sex Goddess” 51), Lopez leaves the

question of sex, including Guadalupe’s queer potential, open.

In her article “Queering the Borderlands,” Emma Pérez talks about de-colonizing

historical imaginations by uncovering those voices that honor multiple experiences and

by looking beyond the white colonial hetero-normative ways of interpretation (123,124).

Further, she asserts that “a white hetero-normative imaginary has defined how

researchers and historians as well as cultural critics have chosen to ignore or negate the

populations who are on the margins, outside of normative behavior, outside of twentieth

century nuclear, white heterosexual family systems” (129). Our Lady defies normative

interpretations related to Guadalupe, and her bodily inscription in art. Unlike Hernández

and Yolanda Lopez, Alma Lopez takes a step further in her print-making: Our Lady is not

solely an oppositional figure armed with masculine power, but a truly plural subject

whose power derives from her own Viceroy’s survival mechanism, in taking the form of

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a poisonous Monarch butterfly.

The artist projects a strong maternal symbolism in the breasts of the butterfly

angel (“Silencing Our Lady” 254-255). Her Guadalupe is connected to a mother image,

but is not cut off from her sexuality, as in the traditional renditions. In creating two

sexualized women, one with mariposa angel wings and the other in the persona of

Christian Mari-a, Lopez avoids the typical Guadalupe/Malinche splitting of the subject

by attaching a queer/mother meaning to both. This also heals the split created by the

traditional heterosexist Catholic symbolism of the Virgen de Guadalupe, which has made

her especially hard for Chicana lesbians to access. In the words of Carla Trujillo,

“Chicana lesbians who confront their homosexuality must, in turn, confront (for those

raised in Catholic households) religion, bringing to resolution some compromise of

religious doctrine and personal life style” (García 284). Hence, it was exactly because of

her “troubling the heterosexual matrix of Chicano/a nationalism” (Calvo, “Art Comes”

207) that Our Lady as a queer Madonna created a shock-wave after its publication in the

Chicano Catholic and political community.

Nevertheless, in the work of Alma Lopez, the female body becomes a site of

contestation and transformation. Much of her creative production challenges masculine

and heterosexual interpretations of Latino icons, which she frequently places in her prints

against the Los Angeles cityscape and the barbed wire fence of the U.S.- Mexico border.

More clearly than feminist artists of the 1970s and 1980s, Lopez situates herself directly

in the Borderlands, where according to Anzaldúa, “the prohibited and forbidden” are

located (Borderlands 25). By attaching a queer meaning to Guadalupe, one of the most

powerful female images of the Catholic iconography, Lopez begins to redefine the

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meaning of the divine, of woman, and of the Chicana.

In her essay “Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe,” Cherrie Moraga

began to develop the concept of queer Aztlán as “a Chicano homeland that could embrace

all its people, including its jotería” (147). Unlike Lopez, she makes a connection

between women’s bodies as territories to be conquered, and therefore seeks their

decolonization in the same way as “brown and female earth” is decolonized (“Queer

Aztlán” 150). Moraga, however, still clings to the Chicano Movement’s notion of nation

building, albeit as a radicalized and restructured entity that embraces all Chicanas/os.

Although she talks about freeing the female (brown Chicana) body, Lopez goes a step

further by creating a Virgin of Guadalupe whose very flesh serves as the site of

liberation, connected not to the Chicano nation as such, but to women’s lived

experiences, desires, and dreams. By using her friends as models for her work, Lopez

depicts bodies of contemporary “real-world” Chicanas, steering away from the popular

Hollywood-inspired ideal of a flamboyant and “curvy” Latinidad as seen in the movies

and on stage. It is of interest that some critics see her Virgin as an oppositional figure

with a defiant gaze, even though her figure has the downcast eyes of the traditional

image. Her posture could possibly be interpreted as defiant, as well as self-confident and

determined. She no longer bears signs of the violated Indian mother, the murderous

Llorona, or the humble, self-abnegating Virgencita of the Catholic Church, but she is

surrounded by empowering symbols from both sides of the border: the bluish green

mantle of Aztec royalty,9

the aureole of Christian divinity and the robe with images of

the Aztec moon goddess. The nude butterfly angel has a small halo of light around her

head, adding spiritual meaning to the figure’s associations with maternity, and sexuality.

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Her migratory power is evinced in her viceroy/monarch wings, which symbolize both a

mechanism for survival and her capacity to migrate between the United States and

Mexico. While the Monarch is free to migrate back and forth between the two countries,

those who are labeled unwanted or unauthorized, by contrast, are prohibited from

crossing over to this side of the border.

Further, the aesthetic of rasquachismo, which Lopez uses in the collage-like

impression of her print, enhances the idea of Chicana subjectivities and their bodily

inscription as a mosaic that is multiple and no longer fragmented but “pieced” together

from experiences past and present, local and transnational, indigenous and Catholic,

sexual and chaste. No longer the art of “the tattered and shattered,” the image of the

Queen Virgin has acquired a quality of wholeness: “lo remendido” (Ybarro-Frausto 156).

Curiously, Anzaldúa, when writing about the Coatlicue state, mentions that “every

increment of consciousness, every step forward is a travesía, a crossing” (70). This, once

again, raises the question of transvestism. If we understand travesía like Sifuentes-

Jáuregui as a Spanish equivalent of the Latin trans-vestire, to dress across (4), Anzaldúa’s

use of the word, in the sense of the English term travesty, can be understood both as a

gender performance and as reflecting a sense of falseness, a lie. It also evokes her

concept of atravesado, referring to those who cross over, or “go through the confines of

normal” (Borderlands 25). Following Sifuentes-Jáuregui’s notions, this contradictory

dialectic has to do with another identity performance, as “by showing the other’s travesty

through denaturalization of genders, transvestism produces a ‘realness’ for itself; and by

reproducing the other’s realness by re-presenting the other… transvestism also reveals the

falseness of the other” (4). While Lopez’s art does not concern itself with dressing across

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genders per se, it is about a travesía of bodily signifiers that place her Guadalupe at the

cross-roads of sexual desire, and thus questions the authenticity of the original. Returning

to the epigraph by Homi Bhabha at the beginning of this chapter, it is exactly through this

corporeal dialectic that Lopez places herself in the “in-between space,” or a third territory

that renews the past and creates alternative meanings for the present.

This should not, however, diminish the spiritual significance of Our Lady. For

Lopez, the Virgin of Guadalupe was a revolutionary female figure of liberation at a time

when the Spanish Conquistadores had decimated nearly the whole Aztec society. The

fact that she appeared to an indigenous man is equally important. Consequently, Sarah

Ramírez, among others, connects Lopez’s work within the indígena feminist world view.

She characterizes it as mestiza or Xicanisma spirituality that draws from everyday lived

experiences with a close tie to the political (“Borders” 226), in this case political

liberation. In my view, Our Lady also represents what Moraga called theory in the flesh,

or rather new politics developed through the material realities of Chicana life and the

beginning of the process of healing of “our wounded knee” (This Bridge, 23).

When Ester Hernández and Yolanda Lopez “lifted the veil of the Virgin’s face”

(Nieto Gómez, “The Chicana” 131), they revealed ordinary but strong Chicana women

working, fighting for their rights, growing old, and shaping culture through art. As the

best-known artists of their generation, who started to revise the image of Guadalupe and

bring her closer to contemporary women, they dispelled stereotypes and transformed

history. In the same way, as the Aztlán of the Chicano Movement can be imagined as a

palimpsest and a liberatory construct, the persona of la Virgen acquired new layers, and

new empowering narratives through Chicana art. In Guadalupe’s body, issues related to

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race, class, ethnic origin, and gender found their expression. While Ester Hernández

created a more secular feminist image, Yolanda Lopez sought strength from the Aztec

goddesses and situated the Virgin’s spirituality in pre-patriarchal, indigenous beliefs.

While these artists broached sexuality in ambiguous, inverted ways, Alma Lopez, by

contrast, gave expression to Chicana queer desire and Chicana agency in the Borderlands.

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Notes

1 See Anaya and Lomeli, Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland (1-5) for a

copy of the Plan. The Plan outlines seven organizational goals and six action

plans for the establishment of a Chicano Nation with its own economic,

educational, institutional, cultural, political and self-defense organisms.

2 The Crónica Mexicayotl (qtd. in Markman and Markman) is considered one of

the most important sources of Aztec historical information, describing their

journey from Aztlán to Tenochtitlán, where they settled under the guidance of

their god of war, Huitzilopochtli, and were given the sign of an eagle perching

and feeding on a cactus. Also, Codex Mendoza depicts the actual founding of

Tenochtitlán in 1325.

3 According to Markman and Markman, the Crónica Mexicaoyotl describes the

finding of Tenochtitlán in the following way: “And when they came out into the

reeds/there at the edge of the spring, was tenochtli/ and they saw an eagle on the

tenochtli, perched on it… And the god called out to them, he said to them/ ‘O,

Mexicans, it shall be there!’/(But the Mexicans did not see who spoke.) It is for

this reason that they call it Tenochtitlán./ And then he Mexican wept, they said/

‘O happy, O blessed are we!/ We have beheld the city that will be ours! Let us go

now, let us rest…’” (409-410)

4 According to the chronicle, this was recounted by Tlaccaelel, the royal historian,

to Montezuma the First, who wanted to find Aztlán.

5 See Tey Diana Rebolledo’s comment, in “Tradition and Mythology” about

Chicana identity and its connection to the land (96).

6 See Markman and Markman for “Cihuacoatl, Her Song” from the Florentine

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Codex. The analysis emphasizes the connection between Earthly fertility and

human acts of war through the embodiment of Cihuacoatl (217).

7 In The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz makes a link between La Llorona and

LaMalinche, two maligned female figures in Mexican folklore (86).

8 Los Siete were seven Latino youths from the San Francisco Mission District

who stood trial in 1969 for the murder of an unarmed policeman. They were

acquitted because the defense presented a strong case, showing generalized police

brutality towards the local Latino population. The youths received considerable

public support, and the community mobilized to take an active stand for Latino

rights. Reported in the San Fransisco Examiner on April 30, 1999.

9 Green also symbolizes regeneration in the Aztec belief system.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Fictions of Autobiography and Fictitious Family Photographs

As a practice… memory work offers a route to critical consciousness that

embraces the heart as well as the intellect, one that resonates, in feeling and

thinking ways, across the individual and collective, the personal and the

political. Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination.

If looking entails a relationship of power, of domination and subjection, of

mutuality and interconnection, how is power deployed and contested within

the family’s visual dynamics? Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames:

Photography, Narrative and Postmemory.

In the previous chapter, I showed how Chicana visual artists re-visioned Aztlán as

a feminist site of contestation through bodily expressions of the Virgin of Guadalupe,

thus expanding notions of female subjectivity to embrace a broad range of sexual, racial

and religious categories. This was accomplished by overlaying feminist notions with

both Christian icons and ancient Mesoamerican symbols that date back to the worship of

powerful female deities prior to the Conquest and the evangelization of the Americas.

Like Gloria Anzaldúa, who developed her theory of mestiza consciousness “crossing”

time periods, territories and languages, many Chicana artists “crossed over” old

stereotypes and envisioned a contemporary sexualized, racialized, and embodied Virgin,

because the visual arts lent themselves to re-imagining the female body. These artists

contributed to a theory that draws on the very flesh of its subjects. Similarly, analyzing

texts by Anzaldúa, Sidonie Smith concluded that the new subject she was writing about

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must be “the bodied rather than the disembodied subject” because “if the body is the

source of an identity that leads to oppression… then the body must be taken back and

honored on the way to speech and writing” (Subjectivity 177). This was one of the goals

of Chicana feminisms, and particularly of first-wave Chicana feminist writers, such as

Ana Castillo, Gina Valdes, and Estela Portillo. Bringing up such issues as sexuality,

identity, exploitation, and pleasure, as examined in Chapter One, was a critical step

toward the goal of liberating the female body (Quiñonez 146). Anzaldúa states: “The

work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her

a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images of her work how duality is

transcended” (Borderlands 102). It is the mestiza consciousness, in the sense of making

whole the psychic, material, and historical aspects of the mestiza, that brings in the third

element.

In this chapter, I will examine Norma Cantú’s Canícula; Snapshots of a Girlhood

en la Frontera, in which old family photographs often invite further stories about the

author’s childhood in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Because there are discrepancies

between the narrative text and the image Cantú presents, I include a brief overview about

the unreliability of memory. Since this chapter also analyzes a form of autobiographical

writing, I discuss the authoritative work of Smith, an expert in the field of self-writing.

Autobiographical practices are of interest to me because they often involve multiple

subject positions and re-working of official histories. As Smith points out, women are

“not merely passive subjects of official autobiographical discourse, they become agents

of resisting memory and creative misprision” (Subjectivity 22). Women’s

autobiographical writing frequently engages strategies of resistance or what Smith calls

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“talking back” (Subjectivity 20). The idea that women are agents who question memory

gives them an active role in transforming cultural scripts and master narratives of history.

The autobiographical subject, according to Smith, also “carries a history of the body with

her as she negotiates the autobiographical ‘I’, for autobiographical practice is one of those

cultural occasions when the history of the body intersects the deployment of subjectivity”

(23). Furthermore, border writing according to Debra Castillo, tends to be discontinuous

and fragmentary, making it hard to reconstitute a unity because it consists of small pieces

from the author’s bicultural past (Border Women 96). Castillo continues to explain that

border autobiographies are stories that frustrate expectations because they do not have a

coherent linear structure or a “beginning at the origin” (97), but rather are structured by a

common image, often at the end of life (97).1

I will explain how Cantú’s work fits this

description, given its lack of a linear plot and the contradictions between the image and

the text.

I will thus explore how the use of photographs in an autobiographical text

expands or complements notions of female subjectivity and contributes to an

understanding of Chicana self-writing. To achieve this, I will also study the role of

border crossing, the connection to the ethnic group, and the significance of the family in

Chicana identity formation. I am especially interested in how notions of the body,

whether in corporeal or literary body, find their expression in creative production,

particularly in narrative and photography. As shown previously, Cherríe Moraga and

Anzaldúa consistently raise issues of race and sex when they discuss their theories in the

flesh, especially in relation to the queer body. In Chicana Art, Laura Pérez explains that

since the 1960s Chicana feminists have “scrutinized the racialized gender and/or

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sexuality politics of European and Euro-American Christianity” (8), and in Alicia Gaspar

de Alba’s words, “As such, the body functions as a site of origin, bridge between worlds

and locus of liberation” (“There’s No Place” 127). Edith Vasquez describes an additional

function of the body in poetry:

The body is both a container of, as well as implement for, poetry. In the hands of

a poet, whose search for justice and historical redress is equivalent with poetry

itself, the female body goes beyond mere representation of oppressive conditions,

histories, and ideologies.2

(“The Body as Parchment” 57)

According to Vasquez, the body, then, becomes an object of conditions and histories,

according to which it constructs itself and responds to oppression (57).

Against this backdrop, I examine Norma Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a

Girlhood en la Frontera as a text that combines multiple narrative strategies that defy

generic labeling, while opening up a dialogue about Chicana identity and the author’s

own coming of age, as seen in family snapshots. Yet, the book is more than a

Bildungsroman of one girl’s development to adulthood; it is what Cantú herself labels

“fictional autobioethnography,” a mix of personal testimonios, autobiographical

vignettes, ethnographic details of life in the bordertowns of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo in

the mid-twentieth century, and stories inspired by family photographs. In short, Canícula

contains “personal narratives turned tales” (Cantú, “Writing of Canícula” 98). Overall,

Canícula includes twenty-one photos with narrative explanations, two immigration

documents with an accompanying story, and a number of vignettes from the author’s life

not accompanied by pictures. The novel’s blurring of fiction and nonfiction speaks to the

changing nature of memories, showing how the objective merges with the subjective, and

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how memory is constructed across time, place, culture, experience, and the unconscious

(Kuhn 5). Consequently, Cantú emphasizes that her stories are not always true to fact,

making it known that her selection and combination of materials involves not only

ethnography and autobiography but also fantasy. This lends an artistic dimension to her

work and places the Borderlands with its inhabitants within multiple crossings of

ethnicity, race, culture, history, geopolitics, and imagination, destabilizing and expanding

traditional concepts of Chicanidad. Indirectly, the text also questions the common

perception of memory as a source of true information. Cantú’s notions about the

unreliability of memory are supported by research. In the 1930s, a British psychologist,

Frederic Bartlett, wrote that remembering is “imaginative reconstruction” that is “hardly

ever exact” (qtd. in Loftus, “Memories of Things Unseen” 147). More recent studies also

show that memories are malleable, and according to Elizabeth Loftus, shaped by what a

person has thought, has been told or has been led to believe (“Make-Believe Memories”

872), rather than being accurate representations of past events. In the context of

Canícula, this means that its autobiographical history, as far as it is based on memory, is

the result of continuous working and reworking of the narrator’s conscious and

unconscious mind, and all that she has read, witnessed, heard, and been made to accept as

facts. Thus, Cantú labels her text as “fictional.” To create the impression of fiction, she

attaches a story or a meaning to her family snapshots that does not always coincide with

the visual image, creating doubt about their veracity. As an example, in the chapter titled

“Dahlia Two,” the picture shows a young child next to a table with a birthday cake.

Instead of two candles, it has four on it (105). Similarly, in the chapter “Cowgirl,” Cantú

writes: “I smile a toothless second-grade chimuela — grin” (33). However, the girl in

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this picture does not appear to be missing a tooth.

In the Introduction to her book, Cantú explains the process by which she

randomly picked pictures from a box, and how,

the story emerges from photographs, photographs through which, as Roland

Barthes claimed, the dead return; the stories mirror how we live in our memories,

with our past and our present juxtaposed and bleeding, seeping back and forth,

one to the other in a recursive dance. (xii)

The reference to Roland Barthes in the “Prologue” and the mention of his seminal text

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography serve as curious details that introduce the

reader to the meaning of photos in Canícula and bring him/her through the borders of

time and space: from Barthes’s Paris to Spain, where the narrator, Nena, reminisces over

the photographs of her lover, and back to the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the place of her

childhood. This establishes her as a transnational traveler who looks nostalgically back

to her family’s past “in that land in between that she calls, la frontera” (Canícula 2).

Unlike Anzaldúa, who envisioned the border as a space of conflict and cultural resistance,

Cantú finds security in that special space, as she skillfully weaves together her family

history with that of the nation state, within a collage of photos and tales. In an interview,

she specifically stated that her intention was to show how cultures mix together on the

border and do not necessarily collide (Dominguez Miguela 668), as Anzaldúa theorizes.

And although the imaginative and subjective experiences are present in the narrative

vignettes, history can also be seen as an important subtext: “Cantú offers a revisionist

history, a history that is constructed through a multitude of private stories situated at the

crossroads of official history and politics” (Mermann- Jozwiak 66). The collective and

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the political, as indicated in the statement by Kuhn that serves as the epigraph to this

chapter, are woven into the body of the text and intersect with the personal. And

although it is important to note that Canícula does not offer cultural criticism per se about

Chicano life in the Borderlands, as seen through the narrator’s eyes, the narrative brings

to consciousness the special problems and inequities that the protagonist and her family

members experienced as part of the collective. However, the difference between this and

other, more politically focused texts, such as Anzaldúa’s, is that Cantú brings history to

life through individual stories and vignettes that loosely mirror larger social problems,

leaving it to the reader to make connections and fill in the gaps. This enhances the

interactive quality of the book (Gutiérez-y-Muhs 116) because it enables the readers to

identify with, (dis)agree and respond to its themes and characters from their own

experiences. At the same time, the snapshots included in the book may look like accurate

representations of family life and historical moments, but they also leave openings that

the reader may fill in. Hirsch takes this one step further when she suggests that family

photos tend to sustain an imaginary cohesion, unattainable in real life (Family Frames 7).

Family photographs have an important place in Canícula. According to Sontag,

photography has become the means of capturing an experience, giving it the appearance

of participation (101). Photographs are used to establish veracity, to show how things

were or are in the present. For instance, in our judicial system, photos of crime scenes

and injuries resulting from a car crash can be used as the evidence of wrong-doing.

Sontag, however, explains that photographs also give people an imaginary ownership of

the past enabling them to take possession of the space, in which they feel insecure (19).

Hirsch focuses in Family Frames on the relationships of power, domination, mutuality,

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and interconnection in the images (9). She suggests that the act of looking at an object is

a mutual act, in which the object also looks at the subject (9). In the family context this

means looking and being looked at. Following this theme, she says: “Familial

subjectivity is constructed relationally, and in these relations I am always both self and

other(ed), both speaking and looking subject and spoken and looked at object” (9).

Family pictures represent not only the lived family experience in a given historical,

social, and cultural context but also a mythology of the ideal family (Hirsch 8). For

example, typical studio portraits tend to present the image of an attractive person or a

happy family, often against an imaginary cropped or artistically arranged background. Of

interest to me here is the idea of family mythology and how pictures, like memory, may

confirm or fictionalize the events of a life.

Cantú establishes a curious connection between death, her photographs, and

memory. The epigraph of Canícula, borrowed from Sontag, labels all photographs as

memento mori through which, in the author’s words, “the dead return” (Canícula xii). But

the book’s memento mori is not so much a reminder of mortality as it is a re-creation of

memories by which the past and its principal actors come to life, for that moment

captured in the picture. Although the author “remembers” many enjoyable moments of

her early childhood, their narration often recalls moments of sadness. Canícula is not

solely a text of happiness and content but reveals an internal conflict, a dialectics of

living and loss being played out. Barthes himself explained that historical photographs

always include a defeat of time (96). Cantú expresses a similar sentiment when she

writes about a picture that was taken of Nena (the author) at the age of three, and asks:

“What will happen to the photo once I’m gone, who will remember the sad child? No

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child will think fondly of it as its mother’s photo” (Canícula 54). The lived moment is

captured in the picture, but will it mean anything after Nena/Azucena/Norma is gone?

Cantú’s commentary suggests that a photograph is a frozen copy of people and events,

leaving the reader with a more profound question about the relationship between the

person, the image and the meaning of representation. Unlike Barthes, who “became” his

mother in order to resolve his conflict over her death (72), Cantú sees in the serious-

looking child a progression of time and a loss that is threatening to erase the meaning of

the image. In other words, as theorized by Debra Castillo: “In contrast with Barthes,

then, who uses noise to make meaning less acute, the Mexican American woman

struggles not to let her fragments of meaning dissolve in the overwhelming presence of a

background dissonance” (102). This is evident, for instance, in a picture where the

author’s grandfather, Buelito, stands next to his beloved Ford truck with a teddy bear on

the steps, looking content. While the picture itself shows a man in his finest clothing,

proud of his car, the memory attached to it recalls the traumatic events of repatriation

when many Mexican Americans lost their belongings to U.S. border officials. The loss of

his Ford was more painful to Buelito than other material losses. This reflection can also

be seen as post-memory because the narrative is related by an aunt, tearful over the

traumatic events of the past while the author remains a witness to it, seemingly unaware

of the context of the picture. According to Hirsch, post-memory refers to recollections of

historical traumas constructed by a second generation, often fragmented and full of gaps

that interface with personal stories (Family Frames 22).

Looking retrospectively at the narrator’s own history, Cantú consciously attaches

to some photographs a meaning that anticipates a later loss: “By giving me the absolute

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past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is

the discovery of this equivalence” (Barthes 96). Thus, the part object here, the punctum,

which captures the viewer’s attention while attracting or distressing him/her, is in the

interconnection between photographic presence and death. However, as pointed out by

Ellen McCracken, in Canícula, the punctum is often evident in the narrative attached to

the picture, rather than in the picture itself (274), as, for example, in the childhood photo

of little Tino extending his hand like a gun, and the account of his death ten years later.

Relationships with the dead are also of inherent interest in the degree to which they have

affected the development of specific sensibilities and subjectivities.

The anticipation of death is expressed most clearly in the chapter titled “Bueli,”

wherein Cantú displays a photograph of her aging grandmother with her sister Dahlia,

Esperanza and herself. The narrative reveals that this was an important occasion, as the

children crowded into the small living room eager to be included in the picture.

Grandmother’s special status is evident, as the author describes her crown-shaped braided

hair, decorated with small combs that Nena bought for her for Mother’s Day after thirty

long minutes of deliberation at the Kress store. Mention of a crown elevates Bueli above

others (Biedermann 84) and establishes the position of distinction, culturally awarded to

the older members of the family. In many ways, this is reminiscent of the grandmother in

Yolanda Lopez’s Guadalupe series, portrayed as a figure of authority and wisdom.

Coincidentally, the photo of Bueli, more than any other picture in the book, shows signs

of age — the color is faded, and the surface has scratches from wear and tear over the

years. The narration ends with a memory of the grandmother’s death, her coffin placed in

the very room where the photograph was taken. The family cohesion is disrupted by

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mourning:”But Mami’s crying. We both cry, hug” (Canícula 25).

As mentioned previously, the presence of death also surfaces in the chapter titled

“Tino.” The photograph above the narrative depicts four children. A handwritten

notation indicates that the picture was taken at Easter in 1952. Although the rest of the

extended family is not shown, the author mentions a piñata and a birthday cake, alluding

to a party. Her brother Tino stands on one side of the picture pointing with his hand as if

playing with guns, suggesting that he was interested in war games well before he went to

Vietnam as a soldier. Again, the story attached to the photograph depicts images

connecting family events to broader Chicano history. While we do not know exactly why

Tino enlisted in the U.S. Armed Forces against his father’s wishes and before graduating

from high school, it is clear from the author’s subsequent commentary that he was a

proud soldier, an “Army-uniformed seventeen-year-old, dreamy eyed, thin-lipped brown

face, wearing pride like a badge” (Canícula 117). Judging by the author’s descriptions of

his interest in guns, and the poverty of the family, it is likely that that he saw a good

future for himself in the Army. As Lea Ybarra tells us, a large number of Chicanos

volunteered for the service because they felt that it was both an honor and a duty to serve

their country. At the same time, the Army offered status and attractive economic benefits

to those who enlisted (Ybarra 5). Consequently, one of the tragedies of this war was the

disproportionate loss of life sustained by Chicanos. According to Ralph Guzmán,

Mexican Americans accounted for 20 percent of U.S. casualties although they made up

only 10 percent of the population in the country (qtd. in Ybarra 5). In national accounts

of history, there is little acknowledgement of the magnitude of Latino participation in the

war. A fact sheet collected by Frederick and Linda Aguirre on the internet (November

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2000), reveals that in states such as New Mexico Latinos paid even a higher price for

their service, accounting for 44 percent of the dead.3

Tino was one of many thousands

who lost their lives in combat. His loss was specifically symbolized by an empty space

on the wall of Cantú’s family home, previously occupied by an image of Nuestra Señora

del Perpetuo Socorro, who was believed to have saved him from illness as a young child.

That the image was removed by Tino’s father opens up questions about faith and the

overriding power of grief that seeks to erase painful memories. The fact that the Virgin of

Perpetual Help had once protected Tino from death but failed to do so in Vietnam was

extraordinarily difficult for his father to bear. The picture, thus, became a symbol of

Tino’s corporeal existence and a painful reminder of the family’s tragic loss.

Consequently, all these losses, on a personal or communal level, become internalized and

form yet another layer of identifications. The dead not only return through Nena’s

memories but continue to live in her person, expanding her subjectivities.

On the other hand, Kuhn explains that family photographs are meant to capture

moments treasured later in life: “The memories promised by the family photography

industry are characterized by pleasure and held-off closure — happy beginnings, happy

middles, and no endings to all the family stories” (19). While this describes the

photographs in “Bueli” and “Tino,” the narrative provides closure through images of

death. The end, however, is left open, to suggest spiritual continuity that cannot be

erased: “Pray so her spirit can be at peace” (Canícula 25) and “The votive candle on the

tiny shelf still burning to an empty space” (Canícula 15). As Cantú shows in the

narrative, the space where the image of Nuestra Señora used to hang, revealed figures of

green fern leaves on the wall paper “like new” (Canícula 15). The catastrophe of death

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that Barthes assigns to every photograph (96) is reworked in the text to show that life is

cyclical and that each erasure reveals another layer of experience and a possibility of

renewal. The pictures convey a reality that the author deepens and sometimes

complicates in the narrative, omitting, adding, and combining details, and making all

boundaries more fluid and questionable, as if to suggest that continuous re-visioning,

reshaping and transitioning are characteristic of Chicano life on the border and

consequently of Chicano identity formation.

In the text, death and loss also bring forth spiritual beliefs and practices that were

transmitted from one generation to the other, whether their beliefs of praying for the souls

of the dead, visiting family tombs, waiting for the spirit of the person to return in the form

of an owl (Gutiérez-y-Muhs 114), celebrating the first communion, or carrying out

typical rituals for the Day of the Dead. While Cantú explains that as a preadolescent

Nena started to question church rules and that her mother continued to believe in living

the Bible instead of just reading it (Canícula 58), the text reveals a hybrid spirituality,

reminiscent of the beliefs and practices expressed by Lopez and Anzaldúa. This

spirituality borrows from Catholicism, ancient Mexican beliefs and popular religious

traditions. Although Cantú writes fondly about religious ceremonies of the family related

to baptism, weddings and funerals that were important in her childhood, she also opposes

institutionalized Christianity. She writes: “One special Friday I ask permission to go with

Ester and her family to Nuevo Laredo. I ask for enchiladas because it’s Friday. I can’t

eat meat. They laugh. I don’t believe them, it’s not a sin in Mexico to eat meat on

Fridays. But I ask Papi and he says it’s true. It’s not a sin” (115). Following this

explanation, Nena not only ordered milanesa con papas, but also started to question the

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arbitrary and unfair rules of the church (115). On the other hand, Cantú reveals how Pre-

Columbian beliefs at times merged with Catholicism in her childhood culture. After a

death, “As we walked back to our own home, Bueli would cross herself and point to a tall

cubreviento, but no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t see the owl she claimed was there

watching us. Sometimes, though, I heard the song of the angels sang over and over in my

soul” (68). Perhaps most of all, Cantú’s syncretic spirituality is expressed in her

acknowledgements of her book: “Finally, and always, I acknowledge the Creator, the

Universe in all its manifestations that guides my every step” (ix). Through religious

rituals, Cantú focuses her text on the importance of the community and the social

transmission of beliefs, customs and celebrations, weaving together the threads that form

a Chicano collective identity (Dominguez Miguela 668).

Fluid Borders of Language

Cantú’s narrative tone is more cheerful in the chapter titled “May,” in which she

gives an idyllic description of how she and her siblings posed with Bueli in front of their

San Carlos Street house in their first communion dresses, later picking flowers to bring to

church as an offering to Mary. The narrator of Canícula explains: And later after the

rosary and the walk and the cup of yerbabuena tea, I lie on the floor out on the porch on a

thick colcha and count the stars, sin cuenta! I smile at the joke, without count sounding

like the number fifty — cincuenta — all at once. And maybe wish on a falling star that

May will always be like this. (Canícula 5) The vignette is about a special moment in the

author’s life that she wants to memorialize, a moment of well-being and content. The

description is full of visual, olfactory and taste images and includes a pun on the phrase

“sin cuenta” sounding like the number “cincuenta,” perhaps comforting in its own way.

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The English words without count and fifty are set in italics, while the Spanish equivalents

are not, in opposition to the common practice of italicizing foreign-language words.

Although the author stated in an interview that she does not italicize Spanish words “so

that the languages remain on equal footing” and to show the fluctuation of the linguistic

borders (Penaz 153), it also lends a momentary importance to the Spanish, granting it the

status of the “official” language. This challenges the monolingual English-only ideology

that culminated in such anti- immigrant initiatives as the English-Only Movement and

California’s Proposition 187, in more recent times. The text later reveals that the

languages were not at all on equal footing, when Cantú’s mother, as a child, was forced to

read and write in English because Spanish was prohibited at school (Canícula 40). Nena

herself was a fluent English- speaker entertaining her Mexican cousins by reciting

nursery rhymes in English to them (23), although clearly her childhood was lived in the

contact zone of both languages. The presence of Spanish is made evident throughout the

book and penetrates the language of Nena’s memories, as shown in her musing over the

words “sin cuenta” and “cincuenta.” More subtly, Cantú infuses the book with Spanish

words that the mainstream reader might have difficulty understanding, such as “I lie on

the floor on a thick colcha” (Canícula 5), “I’ll read a escondidas” (8), and “She is just

chípil” (11). This makes the text more opaque to an English-speaking audience but

reenacts the code-switching that shows how growing up between two languages and two

cultures shaped Nena’s identity development, especially in the early years of her

childhood. Not italicizing the Spanish also emphasizes the ease with which Nena moves

from one language to the other. The intermittent inclusion of Spanish in the text can be

seen as a form of linguistic empowerment or resistance to assimilation, as language is an

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important indicator of cultural heritage and plurality in the mainstream society (Aparicio

200).

In an interview, Cantú discusses at length the issue of code-switching and how

she was interested in producing a text that was linguistically hybrid. She concluded that

including Spanish in the narrative invoked the reality of her growing up, her truth: “… y

esa verdad es que hay dos idiomas que han formado un tercero” (Dominguez Miguela

678). This brought her closer to a Chicano readership that could identify with the

language. The interview itself, while it was conducted in Spanish, was also a linguistic

mix, showing the continued fluidity of the linguistic borders and how code-switching is

an integral part of in Chicana identity. Since subjectivities are expressed discursively, it

also speaks to life on the Frontera as a whole.

Crossings

In the Introduction to Canícula, the author talks about the recursive dance that

occurs in our memory lives. This creative back-and-forth movement, between past and

present and different geographical spaces, is repeated over and over again as the narrator

describes her excursions to “the other side.” Although the context is different, it bears

comparison with the migrational pattern of the Monarch butterfly so central to the art of

Alma Lopez. For Cantú, however, migration appears to be a more porous concept,

because crossing the border was a regular part of her life and served to maintain work,

family and ethnic connections on the other side. Unlike Anzaldúa, whose new mestiza

consciousness was a product of multiple cultures sin fronteras (Borderlands 217), Cantú

depicts the border through a construct of photos, stories and ethno-historical facts, “not as

a stable line, river or bridge but a shifting locus of identity and displacement” (Brady 73),

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the crossing of which functions as an important part of her identity development. The

weaving together of different elements speaks to the complexity of this process and adds

a multi-layered quality to the image. Travel across the borders, between South Texas and

Northern Mexico, informed Cantú’s personal development and that of her family. José

David Saldivar talks about a bridge consciousness, which involves a double vision that

Chicana writers can project across multiple discourses (Border 109). As Norma Klahn

notes, the spacial configuration of the Canícula refers to places of colonization and

exclusion, and can be seen as a sociopolitical contestation of the marginalization of

Chicanos (123).4

Cantú herself emphasizes that Chicanos are a colonized people: “Nos

quitaron el idioma, las costumbres, nuestro orgullo y más que nada la dignidad”

(Domingues Miguela 669). At the same time, she focuses on the importance of home and

family relationships. This connection between the author/ narrator’s self, home life and

Chicano history, forms an important nexus for her identity.

As noted earlier, memory work evokes a critical consciousness that embraces the

personal and the collective; family pictures have a meaning within the cultural context, in

which they were taken (Kuhn 8, 12). For instance, in “First Steps,” a typical portrait of a

child who is learning to walk, the author is standing and smiling at the photographer,

ready to take a step. She wears an embroidered baby dress, which the text reveals was

sewn by Cantú’s mother in 1947, after her husband had gone to Indiana to find better-

paid work so that he could bring the family to the United States. The photograph speaks

to the loneliness Cantú’s father felt in the gray and dark North, surrounded by the sounds

of a meaningless foreign language, and to his desire to reunite with his immediate family.

For his wife, the experience had a different meaning, because it meant that she was able

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to spend more time with her own mother, and sew clothes for her first-born daughter.

Underlying the sunny, traditional baby picture, is a family history of separation, low

wages and migration, linking Cantú’s personal history to that of Chicanas/os and

ultimately the nation itself. Her father was one of many men, who travelled north for

better-paying employment during the period of economic decline and the Bracero

Program,5

only to find the geography of the Midwest and the sounds of a new language

alienating and cold. Although the narrative focuses on his homesickness and his

difficulty in adjusting to the Midwestern way of life, Cantú does not directly talk about

the exploitation and abuses of Mexican men who crossed the border as bracero workers,

most of whom, like her father, dreamed of making a lot of money and ending the poverty

in their lives. She explains that he was eager to move the family to the United States as

soon as he had earned enoug, but “not too far north” (Canícula 29). Thus, in this context

the Borderlands signify comfort and safety, living on the other side for better economic

opportunites, but close enough to Mexico to remain connected to the family and its

cultural roots.

Borderlands and Moving Away from the Assimilation Trap

In the introduction to this dissertation, I argued against the concept of bi-

culturalism that is often associated with acculturation and the linear development of an

identity that progressively incorporates aspects of a person’s culture of origin with those

of the host culture. Some critics feel that U.S. policies’ insistence on assimilation have

colonial roots that have always aimed at wiping out the racialized other, to annihilate

his/her traditions, religion and customs, to make him/her ”the same” under the premise of

equality (Martínez, Phenomenology 104). To move away from these binary

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constructions, I have suggested that theories, such as Soja’s third space and Bhabha’s in-

between space, offer useful alternatives because they are based on a more open logic of

“both/and also,” making it easier to theorize multiple identity development. Because the

assimilation theories assume an American (read North American) subject who has over

time adopted the cultural mores and values of the United States, for Chicana writers the

U.S.-Mexico border became a site of resistance against the monolithic ideologies of both

nation states, and a site of creative hybridity. Klahn has identified Canícula as an

example of “new regionalism” that not only draws attention to the negative consequences

of national politics and policing in the area but also redefines constructs that are central to

the U.S. assimilation ideology by

engaging questions of purity and authenticity, property and propriety, legality and

illegitimacy. In the process, the narrative disrupts traditional categories of self

and other, sameness and difference, national and foreign culture. It deconstructs

the teleology of assimilation between identity and alterity. (Klahn 131)

Cantú herself indicates that her photographs point to the past and the present, which are

“juxtaposed” and “bleeding” (xii), perhaps referring both to her own and her

community’s relationship to the U.S.-Mexico War and the subsequent oppression in the

region that has continued througth the twentieth century and “seeped” into individual

Chicana/o histories. The hybridization and renewal associated with living in the

Borderlands happen when, according to Anzaldúa, the wounding caused by friction

between the Third and the First World begins to heal. This may be an ideal only for the

future, because, in reality, the border is being policed more heavily than ever to stop

illegal immigration from Mexico.6

The border zone has also become the site of violent

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drug wars resulting in kidnappings, torture and death with unforeseen intensity.

Regardless, the state promotes assimilation of the so-called new Americans when it limits

the South/North border crossing, and grants citizenhip only to those who pass an English

language and American history test. This process, however, is more complex than

conservative politics allow because, “before a scab forms, it hemorrhages again, the

lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country” (Borderlands 25). This third

country, I propose, is not only a blend of the earlier two, but also an interstitial space of

multiple transitions that combine and produce a variety of new possibilities. Theorization

about the third space means that regardless of the strong emphasis on assimilation in the

national politics, the mixing of different cultures with the dominant culture always

produces alternative spaces from which new hybrids emerge. This is summarized in

Culture and Difference, where Antonia Darder suggests that the process of hybridization

challenges structures of domination creating a space for new identity formations (13).

Canícula, itself, is situated in the interstices. In the Introduction, Cantú refers to the

meaning of the book’s title, the dog days of summer, as “a particularly intense part of the

summer when most cotton is harvested in South Texas” and “because of the intense heat,

it is said, not even the dogs venture out” (xi-xii). If we understand this time to be, as

Cantú later explains, a mini-season between summer and fall, when cotton is harvested

and when she wrote most of her material, it is not only a month of extreme heat when

even the dogs stay at home, but also a temporal zone of hard work and creativity. Cantú

is well aware that popular myths assign a negative value to the dog days, and she

transforms it. Being confined in this case to the home means not discomfort and idleness

but new crossings and untraditional solutions. The subtitle that follows, Snapshots of a

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Girlhood en la Frontera indicates that the author will provide vignettes about the

protagonist’s (her own) growing up on the U.S.-Mexico border, from early childhood to

adolescence. She explains later, “The subtitle merely prepares the reader for what is to

come, for this is not a narrative strung out in keeping with Freytag’s pyramid: it does not

adhere to conventions of plot development” (xii). Cantú purposefully creates confusion

by not confining herself to a single genre, linear time or historically accurate explanations

of the pictures. As many critics have noted, there are discrepancies between the photos

and the descriptions attached to them, just as memories have gaps and additions that do

not completely correspond to actual events. This blurring of boundaries produces the

effect of the in-between space that enables a shifting and reshaping of identities. These

shifts can be observed, for instance, when the author (Norma) names her narrator first as

Nena and then as Azucena. Similarly, the racial classification in her passport picture is

first “white” and later “brown” (Adams, “Heightened” 62). This perhaps is reflective of

the conflicting racial attitudes on both sides of the border. Jacqueline Martínez points out

that the assimilating effort of the dominant culture is racist by its very nature and results

in negating a person’s racial subjectivities under the name of equality (Phenomenology

104). The racial inscriptions, as well as the naming of Canícula’s main

character/narrator, are surrounded by ambiguous social and political lines. These same

concerns have also been expressed by other Chicana writers. For instance, as a bi-racial

Chicana, Moraga talks about her own struggle with racial classifications and the familial

value system that tried to whitewash her (Loving 43). Similarly, Cantú brings up the

dissonance of color in her passport pictures to show that both on the personal and

political level race matters. The light-skinned “white” baby immigrated with her parents

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to the States, while the “brown” adolescent was allowed to cross to Mexico. Thus, the

South/North crossings have been racially and economically value-laden, as theorized by

Avtar Brah:

The USA-Mexico border typifies the conditions of contemporary migrancy. It

encapsulates certain common thematic, which frequently come into play

whenever “overdeveloped” countries institute measures to selectively control the

entry of peoples from economically “underdeveloped” segments of the globe.

This border speaks the fate of formerly colonized people presently caught up in

the workings of a global economy dominated by transnational capital… (24)

For instance, during the Bracero Program (1942-1964), the selective control of migrant

workers was motivated by economic gain. Citing an earlier study, Alicia Schmidt-

Camacho notes, that Mexican laborers were subjected to physical examinations to

determine which were eligible to migrate across the border (Schmidt-Camacho 93).

Among other physical characteristics, those with blistered hands, which implied hard

work, were given priority. The desire for a highly profitable labor force led to a

colonizing body politic and regulation of migration based on “reading the racialized

body” (93). This led to exploitative labor practices and U.S. border policies based on

labor needs and market profits, rather than considerations of ideology or border safety.7

Border policies alternated between importing labor from Mexico when necessary and

deportation in times of economic distress, as noted in previous chapters.

What Is It about the Place?

The events of Canícula unfold from South Texas to Northern Mexico. Cantú’s

childhood home was located in Laredo, which has a rich history as a border town. Daniel

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Arreola and James Curtis explain, in The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape and Place

Personality, that after 1848, Nuevo Laredo became the Mexican counterpart to Laredo,

which was founded in 1755 on the bank of Rio Grande, having remained dependent on it

thanks to social and economic connections between the families of the two towns since

colonial times (18). After the border shifted south as a result of the war, Laredo’s

Mexican population moved to the opposite shore to avoid being subjected to Yankee rule

(Ruiz, “Asymmetry” 84). The towns were, however, linked by the railroad and remained

an important transportation hub (Arreola and Curtis 18). Laredo (present-day Texas) was

rapidly modernized after the arrival of the railroad and consisted of two “societies,”

Anglo and Mexican (Montejano 95). By 1910, its counterpart, Nuevo Laredo was the

second largest of the Mexican border towns, the business districts of both facing each

other. By the 1920s, the Laredos became major centers of export. The establishment of

the first maquiladora in Nuevo Laredo in 1962 promoted the industrial and economic

growth of the city. Its main north-south artery, Guerrero, runs from the port through the

center and has four plazas around it. Arreola and Curtis describe the central role that the

plaza has played in Mexican urban geography, analyzing its social character and

significance as an important outdoor meeting place (139). The four plazas in Nuevo

Laredo have benches, shoe shine stands, taxi and bus stops, and pushcart vendors of food

(140). Connected to Laredo by three international road bridges and one railway bridge,

Nuevo Laredo serves as an important trade link to the United States. In Cantú’s youth, it

was possible to shop “on the other side” simply by walking across the bridge, at least

until 1954, when it was swept away by Hurricane Alice and replaced by a structure made

of wood and rope (Canícula 9). As noted earlier, Cantú describes how Nena and her

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family walked to Nuevo Laredo with some regularity. “Crossing” the border was not only

an act of migration but also had a more pragmatic purpose, enabling people to make

purchases, go to movies, and visit relatives, among other things. If anything, the walks

over the bridge helped Nena maintain a connection to her heritage and establish her

position as an ethnic subject (Boelhower 88). It can also be theorized that the ease of

physical border-crossing facilitated her acculturation, which involved participation in

both cultures and the maintenance of both cultural identities to varying degrees (Berry,

Phinney, Sam, and Vedder 323). This process was made easier at a time when border

crossers, like Nena, possessed a Mexican passport that declared her a Mexican national,

enabling her to walk to the other side without her parents, even as a child.

For her family, crossing, however, had multiple meanings. They remembered

being forced to return to Mexico in 1935 as part of the U.S. repatriation efforts, and later

coming back. In Cantú’s words, this latter crossing “meant coming home, but not quite”

(Canícula 5). The fact that South Texas was no longer the home the family had

previously known reflects what many other victims of repatriation had experienced. They

had been coerced to leave the country under racially charged policies intended to make

jobs available to North Americans and cut welfare cost (Balderrama 108). At the same

time, they lost most of their material possessions and had to adjust to the harsh realities of

Mexico. For many, both countries proved to be oppressive environments. For those,

who were U.S. citizens, it was shameful that the United States had deported them from

their own country. The children, who were often U.S. born, had a hard time adjusting to

a foreign country and to the Spanish language. These experiences left “scars on the

Mexican American psyche” (Lee 269). And although the survivors of repatriation had

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significant ties to each country, they remained on the margins. This resulted in their

“being in and out of placeon both sides of the border” (Torres, “Transnational” 177).

Thus, the United States was for Nena’s family “a home but not quite,” the other being

Mexico. Such displacement can lead, as Maria de los Angeles Torres asserts, to

fragmentation of identity because when “nation states eroded, they were not replaced by a

homogeneous super-state or a single identity” (179), but multiple identities. This

diversification follows Norma Alarcón’s notions about a Chicana subject-in-process that

constructs provisional identities from a position that incorporates history, race, gender,

and class and operates in the interstices of the U.S. and Mexican nation-states. In this

context, Alarcón refers to combinatory trans-culturations that develop when old cultural

material is reintroduced in a new context (“Conjugating Subjects” 137-138).

While Cantú was able to cross to Mexico and back freely as a child, the border

has become more militarized in recent years than before. Historically, its jurisdiction on

the U.S. side was initially divided between the U.S. Customs Service (1853) and the U.S.

Border Patrol (1924) with guarded check points, while on the Mexican side there was less

screening (Arreola and Curtis 193). In fact, the Mexican border cities had been

dependent on the North American entertainment and tourist industries since the early

twentieth century. Although much of this involved brief trips to eat, drink and shop on

the other side, the border cities’ nightlife and prostitution also attracted visitors. North

Americans had a tropicalized view of Mexico that was reinforced by attractions such as

photograph stands where visitors could have their picture taken wearing Mexican

clothing and sitting on burros. As artificial as these attractions were, according to

Arreola and Curtis, they fulfilled the tourists’ fantasy for foreign adventure because of “a

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certain ineffable satisfaction or wish-fulfillment when a place lives up to pre-existing

images, even if it does so by contrivance” (Arreola and Curtis 92). In fact, many of the

border towns developed cityscapes and zones selling goods (and bodies) tailored

specifically for North American taste. One of the main photos Cantú presents in

Canícula shows her mother in Mexican attire standing against a fake background, like

any North American tourist visiting the other side. This photo raises questions about her

ethnic identity. After all, she was Texas-born, and as the text shows, she had been, “A

carefree teen with family on both sides of a river that’s never a barrier…, her land lies

beyond borders” (Canícula 42). Cantú leaves ambiguous her mother’s ethnic identity and

nationality, to emphasize the fluidity and transformative character of the Borderlands

existence.

The Embodied Subject of Herstory

Cantú calls her narrator Nena8, a fitting name for the oldest girl in the family. At

the same time, the name affords her anonymity, as she could be any nena of a Latino

family. This makes it easier to theorize that although Canícula is about a specific life

history, it intersects with other Chicano lives on the border. On the other hand, in her

official childhood passport photos the subject is not Norma but Azucena, obviously a

made-up name that is pasted on a piece of paper over the original citizenship documents.

The name Azucena is of interest because it refers to a flower, like the names of Nena’s

several other siblings: Dahlia, Azalia, Margarita, Xóchtil, and Florentino. Through the

name Azucena, the narrator groups herself with her siblings, as if to emphasize the

importance of family unity within the sibling subset. The white lily (azucena) is

considered a symbol of pure, virginal love (Biedermann 207) with strong Biblical

overtones. Purity of the lily, in this connection, can be seen as a symbol of childhood

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innocence or as an ironic reference to the narrator’s growing sexual concerns as against

the assumed asexuality of a young girl. As a bodily expression, it speaks to beauty and

natural perfection, again in direct opposition to the everyday concerns of a developing

girl, such as her growing breasts, body hair and a broken tooth.

The flower symbolism, as conventional as it may seem, takes another turn when

later in the book, Cantú calls the girls of the family, “Mami’s flowers” (Canícula 116).

The reader has already learned that the narrator’s mother and grandmother worked in

their garden together. For instance, after the big flood that followed Hurricane Alice,

they “begin again, all year they plant, sharing cuttings from neighbors’ plants that

survived; hibiscus, jasmines, ferns and roses, and a brand new gardenia bush right under

the bedroom window to sweeten the air” (Canícula 10). This is one of a few vignettes

that directly refers to the mother’s care-giving role: she planted a garden of beautiful

flowers and herbal health remedies. This not only undid the destruction of the hurricane

but also permits the reader to imagine the metonymic connection between the growth of

these plants and “Mami’s flowers.” Some of these plants originated from cuttings that

were tough enough to have survived the flood, suggesting that it was possible to flourish

even under life-threatening conditions, just as Villanueva identifies herself with the

sturdy weed, noted in Chapter Two. The flood following Hurricane Alice can be seen as

a foundational event that entailed much destruction, but was experienced differently on

either side of the border. Time Magazine reported the following:

At midnight, 19 hours after the Ozona disaster, the Rio Grande crested some 150

miles away at the trans-river cities of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras. Forewarned,

the Texans of Eagle Pass had moved out to watch in safety as their homes

flooded. Across the river, the Mexicans of Piedras Negras placed their faith in an

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earthen dike; they were huddled in their straw-hatched adobe homes when the

dike collapsed and the Rio Grande swept over. “I heard hundreds crying for help

in the dark,” said one witness. “You could hear houses collapsing, then screams,

then nothing.” More than half the town was destroyed. (n. pag.)

The disaster had a very different impact on either side of Rio Grande; on one side, the

narrow economic and socio-cultural margins made it an experience of death, while on the

other, the losses were mostly material. After lining up for painful vaccinations against

diseases such as polio and typhoid, Nena concluded that soon only the watermarks and

photos of newspaper clippings would be left as a reminder of the fear and loss caused by

the flood. The family and the community, like Mami’s tough cuttings, had survived and

were safe again.

While the narrative shows multiple mothering influences in Nena’s life, in the

photographs her maternal grandmother repeatedly appears in a caretaker role in the

company of the children, although her tall figure in some pictures appears distant and

gazing away from the youngsters. In “Blue Stroller,” she looks off to the side, while in

“May” she poses among the children, yet farthest from Nena, who stands apart from the

others. This might reflect Nena’s individualization as the oldest sibling, as well as her

emotional distance, although on a spiritual level Bueli played an important role in her

life, and her presence was felt by Nena even after her death. The mother is absent from

many photos and is present visually only twice in the book as the main subject: once as

an attractive teenager in a china poblana folk costume, and a second time in her wedding

picture. It is of interest that Cantú repeatedly brings up the physical appearance of her

mother conferring on her the aura of a famous Mexican actress. Nena describes her

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mother in her wedding picture as “movie star beautiful” with “María Félix eyes”

(Canícula 109), comparing her to a female icon, who was once thought to have been the

most beautiful woman in Mexico. This suggests that Nena had an interest in Mexican

movies and was fully familiar with the actresses. Although she felt homesick when

staying with her cousins “on the other side,” missing the series she watched on U.S.

television, Nena had also identified with Mexican idols. While her U.S. life was

surrounded by Ed Sullivan, Lucille Ball, and Dinah Shore, she secretly read a women’s

magazine Confidencias and imagined herself as the leading female star of its tragic love

stories. At the same time, as a Mexican American, Nena was different from her cousins

on the other side. They called her pocha, and although this was uttered in a playful spirit,

it speaks to the perception that many Mexicans held of Chicanos as pochos, or being sold

out.

In depicting Mami as “movie star beautiful,” Nena differentiates her from

traditional images of working-class women. Like Nena, her mother had been a regular

border-crosser who commuted between a home in Rodriguez, Mexico, and a job in the

United States. The fact that she was born in Texas made it easy for her to travel back and

forth. The daily border-crossing reinforced her biculturalism so that she felt comfortable

with both the fox trot and danzones. In another vignette, “On the Bridge,” the author

writes: “In the photo Mami squints in the sun, she is beautiful and angry, impatient. The

weight of all of us on her shoulders” (Canícula 8). This suggests that she was not a

submissive mother who sacrificed all her needs to mothering without a complaint, but

was also aware of the hardships a large family entailed. Although the photographs focus

on her looks, the narrative histories broaden the image: she was a teenage factory worker,

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who later gave birth, sewed, planted, boiled dirty diapers, read Confidencias, made

purchases, and mediated conflicts between her husband and children. She was also the

family historian, as she photographed, labeled and safeguarded pictures in a shoe box.

She is presented as practical and focused when taking care of one baby after another,

perhaps to the neglect of Nena herself. As the oldest child, Nena’s job was to help take

care of the younger siblings. Cantú describes some heartfelt moments when Nena seeks

out closeness pretending that she has lice so that she can put her head on Mami’s or

Bueli’s lap and have them caress her hair (Canícula 125).

Cantú is determined to celebrate the strong women from her childhood in

Canícula: “I wanted to tell the stories of women who survived, who struggled, who

worked as schoolteachers, who sold Avon and Stanley door to door, as well as the

mothers who went to work on the fields alongside the men” (“The Writing” 105). In

addition to her mother, these women included grandmothers, extended family members,

neighbors and godmothers. In the chapter titled “Comadres,” Cantú paints a picture of

three neighbor women who look directly into the camera and give support to one another

(36). They shared each other’s successes and misfortunes and above all were “women

sharing life, tending to each other” (Canícula 36). The description contrasts with the

stereotypical perception of Mexican, and other Latin American, women as bearers of the

Marian cult, which views them as long-suffering, morally superior, and dependent

(Stevens 94-95), unable to assert themselves or express feelings/desires that challenge

the Catholic dogma or the tradition of male privilege. On the contrary, Cantú’s co-

madres are caring and strong. They look straight into the camera, laughing, hoping, and

loving. They are the backbone of the family unit and the community.

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Cantú shows Mami as beautiful, angry and impatient. With a young girl’s

infatuation, Nena attributes film-star quality to her mother, especially in the look in her

eyes in the wedding picture that reminds her of Maria Félix’s sensuality. Maria Felix’s

wit, outspoken manner, and refusal to follow the conventions of her time may have

attracted Nena’s attention, since she had started to question her own religious and cultural

traditions. By comparing her mother to a film-star known for several amorous liaisons,

Nena opens up another taboo subject, female sexuality. While she does not directly

address the topic, she approaches it from a child’s perspective: Nena herself imagines that

she is the star of love letters. She also has a loving relationship with her friend Henrietta

and dreams of a marriage to a young Mexican man, Rene, while rejecting the idea of

becoming a Mexican wife.

Furthermore, Mami’s job as a factory worker and skilled seamstress during her

youth placed her in the world of paid labor (Rebolledo, Chronicles 145-146). During her

marriage, she used these skills to help her husband cover the family’s expenses. She

operated in the public/private spheres of economic production, and although she did work

that was usually performed by women, she was able to provide alternative values for

Nena, who remained ambivalent about marriage: “I am frightened to imagine myself

living the life of my married cousins; I imagine myself married, with babies like Mami,

and with a jolt I realize I don’t want that” (Canícula 127). This suggests that Nena, on

some level, experiences her mother as succumbing to the burdens of motherhood, and

dreads that fate. For herself, Nena learned from her mother how to sew and value

clothing of fine fabric. She was also encouraged to learn a skill and go to beauty school,

becoming an adolescent hairdresser of some repute among her friends and family

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members. While this did not develop her academic skills as such, a vocation was

important for many working-class children, so that they could become economically

independent or contribute to the family income. Becoming a hair-stylist helped Nena to

individuate from her immediate family. The same happened with religion. Cantú

explains that Mami had accepted some of the religious and cultural expectations of her

era by joining the Teresitas and the Hijas de Maria, and wanted her oldest daughter to

continue this tradition (“Chicana Life Styles” 15). While Nena is presented as a dutiful

older sister and an obedient child who shared in household chores, she quietly rejected

some of the family’s expectations of her. This was evident when she started to question

church rules, protest with farm workers, march for the ERA, and read Marx.

While she praises her mother’s film star-like beauty, Nena’s description of her

own body was more ambivalent. As the oldest child of a working-class family, she had

to help in the cotton fields at a young age. Although there is no photograph to record

this, the hard work outdoors left its imprint on Nena. She described how her body ached,

and how insects bit her arms, legs, and neck, leaving them full of welts and puss-filled

blisters: “In the photo, smiles belie tired, aching feet and backs; smiles on serious faces,

stiff bodies posed for life” (Canícula 3). Although Nena had fleeting moments of feeling

like the Chalupa of the lotería game or the actress Dolores del Rio, when she was dressed

in her china poblana costume as a child, her reality was that of a Mexican American

youngster of limited economic resources. Life was hard, and the “stiff bodies with frozen

smiles” in the snapshots were testament to that. Medical resources were also scarce, and,

when cooking for her siblings, Nena suffered a serious grease burn, missing school for

two days as a consequence. Unlike her well-off class mates, she was not able to go to a

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doctor but relied on her mother’s home remedies. When her middle-class teacher asked

whether she had gone to the hospital, she knew better than to talk about the herbal

remedios that her mother was using to treat her, and remained silent. Her silence was an

indication of class and cultural conflict—not feeling understood in her own context as a

young Chicana from a financially struggling family. After all, her mother’s remedies

worked well, and the burn healed without even leaving a scar.

One of Nena’s preteen concerns had to do with her breasts, and she worried that

carrying babies on her hip while growing up would make one breast bigger than the

other. Interest in her body, wearing bras, and becoming a woman were the typical

concerns, of other adolescents of the time. Nena described herself as an “awkward teen,

shy and reticent” (60). She was struggling with her ethnic identity, as indicated in her

preoccupation with her hairy legs and un-plucked eyebrows, which her mother did not

allow her to shave, unlike the mothers of her rich, white friends. In her culture shaving

meant behaving like a gringa. Her identity as a female was also called into question

when she heard a Jewish girl comment that “hairy legs and underarms make a girl look

like a boy” (60).

Meanwhile, Nena managed to convince her mother to buy her black leather flats

with colorful rhinestones, only to hear her father say that they were shoes “for a puta, not

a decent girl” (61). Although Nena got to keep them, she did not wear them very often.

She comments, however, that she wore them in her quinceañera photo in front of friends

and family, thus asserting her will and refusing to accept the masculine good girl/bad girl

split image that her father had invoked. Although the quinceañera represents the

transition of a girl into adulthood and enables her to wear make-up, put on heels, and go

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to dances (Cantú, “Chicana Life-Cycle” 15), wearing rhinestone shoes was perhaps not

only an act of rebellion, but also an assertion of her independence from Papi. In effect,

Nena’s defiance was a statement of her own views of sexual identity, which did not

define a woman as a whore, even if she wore stylish, feminine shoes. At the same time,

Cantú points out how deeply embedded these gender stereotypes were, and how Nena

tried to overcome them through an alliance with her mother who bought the shoes with

her own money. A mother/daughter female coalition was formed between Nena and her

Mami to enable her to get the shoes in spite of her father’s negative view of them.

In spite of Papi’s old-fashioned views of female sexuality, he is portrayed as a

source of security for Nena, a caring father, who was deeply hurt when his only son died

in Vietnam. In “Parade,” when he holds his eldest daughter on his shoulders, she recalls:

“So comforting, so secure to be held aloft and to feel the security, the strength of his

arms. So many times he held me” (Canícula 37). This helped Nena to be close to him

and to identify with him. Papi also provided the family with welcome breaks from the

day-to-day routines, for instance, when he would take a shower after work, pack

everybody into his car, and drive to the lake (91).

Another influence on Nena was Tia Piedad, her big-city aunt who was much

concerned about etiquette and good posture, and who was the subject of admiration in the

family, even though something of an anomaly. During the period when Nena worked in

an office, she admits to having a shoe fetish and owning more shoes than clothes. This is

reminiscent of Tia Piedad, who had a matching pair of shoes for every outfit. Nena’s

consumption of footware was later moderated to one pair of summer huarachas and

boots for the winter. Regardless, Tia Piedad with her good manners and health concerns,

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symbolized by her 1962 edition of Corrección de Postura, remained an influential figure

in Nena’s life. Her name, Piedad, also suggests a strong religious faith. It was, however,

clear that Nena was pleased not to have to go spend time with Piedad in Mexico City, as

some of her cousins did. Again, despite her aunt’s insistence on propriety, Nena

demonstrated her individuality and values, which included lying on the couch, squatting

on the floor or throwing her legs over the arm of a chair (Canícula 85). Similarly, the

ordering of events in Canícula is not straightforward but zigzags here and there,

suggesting that Cantú wanted to avoid conformity and create a book that defied tradition

by combining genres, experiences, and truths, reflecting life in the Borderlands.

Sexual conflict in Cantú’s family is most clearly expressed in the figure of cousin

Elisa. Seduced and impregnated as a teen, she was expelled from her home, and moved

to Los Angeles where she worked and sent money to her little daughter. When she came

for a visit to Matamoros she caught the attention of everyone “in her daring two piece

black bathing suit” (Canícula 76). Elisa’s sensual feline-like quality and caring nature, is

illustrated in the narrative, when Cantú describes her voice as caressing “with soft purrs”

(Canícula 76). Although at the time her single life seemed exciting, and Nena was eager

to hear about it, Elisa ended up in a traditional marriage to a Chicano widower, who

expected her to cater to his needs after a full day of work: “She washed, ironed and daily

laid out his clothes, down to the very handkerchief he would carry that day” (Canícula

78). While marriage was certainly a conventional solution to Elisa’s life tragedy —

sadness about not being able to raise her own daughter or be near her family — Cantú

underscores her strength as a wage-earner who could economically support her child and

later do a doble jornada as a working wife and her husband’s care taker, maintaining her

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happy-go-lucky attitude and daring personality despite her family’s rejection of her.

Belief in curanderas and faith healers played an important role in Nena’s family

and social network. Papi traveled to a small place in the Mexican mountains to get help

for his arthritis. There, Nena encountered a young girl who appeared disturbed, with a

blank, emotionless stare. The girl, Manuela, had been raped and never recovered

psychologically from the experience. While her ailment was only whispered about and

publicly explained that it stemmed from puberty, in reality, she had been a victim of an

assault and bore its marks both on her body and in her psyche. According to a common

stereotype, her symptoms were explained as consequence of her sexual development,

although Nena suspected that there was more to her story. The only way that Manuela

could cope with her pain was by dissociation and turning inward, away from the outside

world, perhaps in the same way as the torture victims that Elaine Scarry studied. As

Scarry puts it, “Intense pain is also language-destroying: as the content of one’s world

disintegrates, so the content of one’s language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so

that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its body” (35).

Manuela was just an empty shell, without speech or cognition, as a result of her rape. As

a child, Nena did not fully understand issues of sexual violence. According to the

narrative, Nena walks away and thinks about Papi’s illness with arthritis and his multiple

trips to healers, superimposing the two stories of suffering. And although Nena sees a

shooting star and wishes Papi well, she is overcome by sadness: “Alone in the moonless

night I feel the tears well up and let them come” (124). Perhaps the tears were also for

Manuela.

Manuela’s trauma was produced by male violence; yet it was only one of many

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crises in the lives of Nena, her family, and her community. While Cantú focuses on

events that might happen in any cultural group, the narration weaves in Chicano history

and the specific experiences of a young girl growing up on the border, in the contact

zones of Mexico and the United States. In the background, national traumas such as the

War of 1848, the repatriation of Mexican Americans in the 1930s, and the tragic losses of

Vietnam are shown to impact both the collective ethnic psyche and the subjectivities of

the protagonist. Loosely speaking, one can label present narratives of these losses as

post-memory, a term developed by Marianne Hirsch for second-generation accounts of

Holocaust survivors (Family Frames 22). Canícula demonstrates the constructed nature

of these and all memories and the human tendency to fill in the gaps with subjective

experiences and even with imagination. In the book, facts and fiction merge, leaving

questions about what life was really like in Cantú’s childhood, what her relationship

really was with her mother and grandmother, and what really happened in her

community. The fact that we do not know leaves us open to the possibility that life and

subjectivities in the Borderlands combine all the possibilities (Soja’s both/and logic) or

none. Cantú’s prophetic words “crossing meant coming home, but not quite” (Canícula

5) are descriptive of life in the interstices, in and between many home bases.

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Notes

1 Debra Castillo concludes that in Norma Cantú’s text the important symbol is

the huesario, which represents a heap of unclaimed bones, that function as a

metaphor for the fragmentary narrative, 97.

2 This analysis pertains to the poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes. I broaden the idea

of the body as a container to other works of literature where self-writing is an

important focus.

3 In Aztlán and Vietnam, George Mariscal points out that it is very difficult to

ascertain how many Chicanos died in Vietnam, because in public records

Mexican Americans were listed as “Caucasian,” 3.

4 Cantú explains that the title of the book refers to the dog days of summer in

Texas, when she wrote the material, and experienced such intense heat that not

even dogs ventured out, xi- xii.

5 The Bracero Program was instituted during and after the Second World War to

bring cheap Mexican labor to agriculture and to supplement the loss of U.S.

workers who joined the Army or went to factory work. The policy was codified

under the 1942 Emergency Labor Program. See Alaniz and Cornish, 130.

6 More recent efforts to stop illegal immigration and deport those who are

illegally in the country can be seen, for instance, in Arizona SB 1070, which

authorizes the police to verify the immigration status of persons they stop, even

for small violations such as traffic stops. See The New York Times, Sept. 6, 2012.

7 See Acuña, 168-171, for a description of the Bracero Program and how it was

used to supplement the labor market, depress wages and break strikes. Although it

violated the international labor laws, the program cemented U.S. power over

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Mexico.

8 Nena refers to a young girl in Spanish.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Conclusions

Cuando vives en la frontera

People walk through you, the wind steals your voice,

you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat,

forerunner of a new race,

half and half – both woman and man,

neither – a new gender;

………………….......

To survive the Borderlands

you must live sin fronteras

be a crossroads. Gloria Anzaldúa, “To Live in the Borderlands

Means You”

The lines above written by Anzaldúa capture the paradox of living in the

Borderlands. Life there is about wounding and collisions. It is also about the plural

identity of Borderlands dwellers, who are not only scapegoats and burras,1

men and

women, but also forerunners of a new race and a new gender. This identity, by

combining multiple categories, breaks down Western dualisms that, in Anzaldúa’s view,

imprison Chicanas/os and maintain oppressive societal relations of power. Her answer is

to be a bridge, a crossroads. Anzaldúa writes:

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The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males

and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our

lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic

thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long

struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of

violence, of war. (Borderlands 102)

These notions are expressed in the writing of feminist theorists, such as Cherríe

Moraga, Norma Alarcón, Sandra Cisneros, and Paula Moya, and are complemented in

this dissertation by theories of location. As explained in previous chapters, Anzaldúa was

one of the first writers to focus on the plural positionalities and the mestiza consciousness

that combines the Indian, Mexican, and North American heritages: “The new mestiza ….

learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view.

She learns to juggle cultures” (Borderlands 102). Similarly, Chela Sandoval’s notions

about Third World feminist tactics of resistance embrace a differential (or mestiza) mode.

She utilizes the idea of oppositional consciousness, which is “consciousness-in-

opposition to U.S. social hierarchy that is capable… of aligning a variety of oppositional

movements with one another across differing gender, race, culture, class, or national

commitments” (358). And although Sandoval developed her theory of technologies of

resistance after examining broader U.S. Third World feminist works, the mestiza

(differential) mode as a tactic of resistance resonates in the writing of the authors studied

in my dissertation.

On the other hand, notions about the importance of location, as theorized by bell

hooks (margin/center), Homi Bhabha (in-between) and Edward Soja (third space) play a

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significant role in my analysis, because these spatial constructs enable conceptualization

about multiple subjectivities and their relationship to location. For Anzaldúa, this space

is the U.S.-Mexico border, but she notes that the Borderlands can be cultural, sexual,

psychological, racial and spiritual, not only geographic. The concept of new

subjectivities emerging in-between cultures and combining, as Soja states, a multiplicity

of perspectives that in Western dualistic thinking are considered incompatible, helps us to

understand the dynamic movement and shifting, so central in Anzaldúa’s thinking about

the Borderlands. This same re-shaping and shifting subjectivities inside and between the

borders is evident in the artistic expressions that I analyzed in my work.

The first goal of this dissertation was to show how Chicana writers and artists in

the 1970s to 2000 responded to the Chicano Movement’s masculinist practices and

dominant society’s discriminatory conditions by engendering a rich corpus of creative

works that gave Chicanas a voice. My secondary goal was to demonstrate that the

development of multiple subjectivities is a result of what Anzaldúa calls “racial,

ideological, cultural, and biological cross-pollination” (Borderlands 99), enhanced, as

stated above, by the shifting presence of the U.S.-Mexico border. And although

Anzaldúa echoes the Movement’s reclamation of Aztlán and el otro Mexico as the

Chicano mythical homeland, she also acknowledges that, “as a mestiza, I have no

country, yet all the countries are mine, because I am every woman’s sister or potential

lover” (Borderlands 102). This raises another paradox of the Borderlands: the

dislocation of the mestiza means living everywhere sin fronteras. While Anzaldúa’s

perspective appears idealistic in a world that has become more alienating and more

hostile to its border-crossers, it does convey accurately the idea of “being at home, but

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not quite” (Canícula 5) on both sides of the border. Anzaldúa takes this notion a step

further, creating a cosmos that serves as a borderless country for mestizas, whom the

homeland has rejected or even “thrown out.” This stands in contrast to the myth

endorsed by the Chicano Movement when it imagined Aztlán as the homeland of all

Chicanos. Female writers focused on a different locus, their bodies, which they could

claim as their homes, when for instance, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, developed her theory of

embodied aesthetics (“There is No Place” 127). It is the female body that functions as “a

site of origin, bridge between worlds, and locus of liberation” (127). Similarly, this

notion resurfaces in the numerous transformed images of the Virgin of Guadalupe by

Chicana artists.

In the works of poets Alma Villanueva, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Pat Mora,

identity is explored intensely and tied to Chicano family life, indigenous cosmology, and

nature. As I have shown in Chapter Two, Villanueva’s Bloodroot is a woman-centered

text, in which the author focuses on the mythical origin of men and women as emerging

from the womb of ancestral Motherafrica. Close relationship with the natural world gives

the poetic persona both special knowledge and a connection to the primal elements of the

ancient animal and plant worlds. Through a sexualized relationship with these worlds,

the poet gives birth to herself, demonstrating her transformative powers as a woman and

as a writer. Although Villanueva’s poems are better described as woman-centered rather

than strictly feminist, they provide a critique of men’s alienated relationship with the

Earth, and consequently with woman in general, whom the Earth symbolizes. Villanueva

also challenges notions of male privilege in social institutions that label women inferior,

and their bodily functions dirty. Given their strong focus on womanhood, Villanueva’s

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poems can be seen as essentialist. However, she moves away from dualistic

conceptualizations through the creation of a mythical story of the origin of all people, a

world of indigenous beliefs/practices, and the ancient natural world, with which women

are interconnected.

Cervantes focuses much more on Chicana ethnic identity and the impact of class,

race, and sex on its development. Her interest in political activism and her cultural

criticism are directly expressed in her texts. Thus, she writes about the problems

Chicanas encounter in their daily lives, such as domestic violence, rape, and oppressive

work conditions. She contrasts these themes with idyllic images of a disappearing

landscape and the ways of older generations, more intimately connected to nature and a

natural way of life. Cervantes, like Villanueva, is concerned about her identity as a poet,

hence the reference to plumes in the title of her book, Emplumada. In fact, Cervantes

temporarily stopped writing after the death of her grandmother and murder of her mother,

because she felt that “poetry was not possible in this world” (González, “I Trust Only” 8).

In Cervantes’ poetry the “I” and the poetic persona become one. Many of the

poems appear to include autobiographical facts about the poet’s maturation into

adulthood. These personal poems stand in stark contrast to the more lyrical poems of the

collection, because of their strong emphasis on the negative aspects of male machismo,

manifested in heavy drinking, wife-beating, and sexual abuse of children. Cervantes

contrasts these behaviors with the natural world, and the way birds nest together, for

example. The poet explains: “In California in the summer/ mockingbirds sing all

night/Grandma says they are singing for their nesting wives/ They don’t leave their

families/ borrachando” (Emplumada 12). Throughout the text, the poet provides a

183

woman- centered criticism of male violence and dysfunction in Chicano family structure.

As a corrective to the destruction in the wake of machismo, Cervantes finds strength in

women, presenting her own family as a three-generational female-led household, and

herself as a scribe who, like Malinche, translates foreign letters and helps the older

generation manage English-language documents.

Identity questions are the focus of several poems in Emplumada. “Refugee Ship”

and “Oaxaca, 1974” address the poetic persona’s difficulty in reconciling the difference

between her Chicana heritage and her North American upbringing. This split in her

identity occurs in language, at the point when she is not able speak with the authority of

native Spanish-speakers in Mexico. Such fragmentation of identity has been a frequent

topic of investigation for a number of Chicana feminist critics. As explained earlier in

the dissertation, a split in subjectivity occurs when the speaking female subject is thrown

into a crisis of meaning, trying to occupy a different position from the culturally

normative one (Alarcón,“Making Familia” 211). Similarly, Alarcón’s notions about

identity-in-difference and subject-in-process can be theorized in some of the poems of

this study, as these subjectivities assume a discursive presence that is ever-shifting and

changing, through an affirmation of difference that questions and disrupts existing

categories, such as nation, class, and race (“Conjugating” 136-137). Accordingly, in

Cervantes’ poetry, the crisis of meaning occurs in language when the poetic persona

remains an outsider, a “pocha” among native Spanish-speakers in Mexico or when her

name and mirror image do not reflect her North-American upbringing. In describing

herself as a “pocha” seed whom Mexico rejects as “esputa,” Cervantes makes another

reference to Malinche, this time to her stereotypical image as the traitor of her race and

184

the sexually compromised concubine of Cortés, the violated mother, La Chingada (Paz

79). Emplumada, however, does not offer a concrete solution to the identity

fragmentation of the poetic persona. Like Villanueva, Cervantes finds comfort in her

Indian heritage, the plumes of the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl that provide her with tools to

write, and the wide horizons open to birds as they freely migrate across the borders.

Pat Mora is considered the most “fronteriza” of the poets studied. The poems of

Borders not only reflect her own experiences in the El Paso-Juarez Borderlands, her

bilingual childhood, and connection to indigenous beliefs, but also her sense of the

inequities suffered by Chicanos. Accordingly, Mora wanted to give voice to silenced

Mexican women in the United States, such as the cleaning woman Ofelia in “Grateful

Minority” and the maids of “the other room” in “Sonrisas.” Unlike Villanueva and

Cervantes whose poems reflect experiences of poverty, abuse, and abandonment, Mora’s

dilemma lies in the injustice of the difference between poverty-stricken Mexicans and

privileged society. She also focuses on the first generation of working-class Chicanas

who were able to get a university education, as “we move cautiously/ unfamiliar with the

sounds,/ guides for those who follow/Our people prepared us/ with gifts from the land”

(Borders 19).

In Mora’s poetry, the female body is not marked by violence and unbearable

working conditions as it is in Villanueva’s and Cervantes’s work, but rather seeks refuge

in nature. While Mora writes less about the concrete crossing over to the Mexican side

than Cervantes, she is concerned with the “two rooms” that separate poor immigrant

women from privileged white women. Somewhat like Cervantes in her experience in

Oaxaca, Mora’s poetic persona does not have full access to the “other room” with

185

Mexican maids and remains an observer at the door. She hears the familiar sounds of

laughter and the clicking of coffee cups, but is unable to participate. Thus, in Borders,

Mora’s resistant voice speaks against inequities between socio-economic and ethnic

groups, lack of educational opportunities, and the oppressive border control of la Migra.

In “Immigrants,” she also demonstrates how Latina/o immigrants try to assimilate into

the dominant culture, by purchasing American products and giving their children

American names. Mora, like Anzaldúa herself, takes a stand against the forced (and often

internalized) assimilation and the anti-immigrant politics of the dominant culture.

Mora has been called a multicultural eco-feminist who grounds the Chicana

identity of her poetic persona in nature, and sees similarities in exploitation of natural

resources and oppression of women (Murphy, “The Women” 23). The desert appears in

her poems as the embodiment of the mother figure, a source of sustenance and symbol of

endurance. Like clandestine Mexican border-crossers or subjugated Chicanas in the U.S.

Southwest, Mora’s desert women have a tough skin that repels the natural elements. They

thrive with almost no nourishment and “whisper our sad songs behind our thorns”

(Borders 80). Despite the extreme conditions of sadness of their existence, Mora

concludes that like the cactus, “we stun when we bloom” (80).

All three poets Villanueva, Cervantes, and Mora write from a feminist perspective

opposing male privilege and all forms of oppression. Each collection of poetry includes a

small section that could be labeled autobiographical describing the author’s maturation

into adulthood. These can be seen as coming of age narratives. As the poetic persona

crisscrosses the U.S. Mexican border, and racial, sexual, psychological, and economic

borders, she incorporates into her identity traces of the history of powerful Aztec female

186

deities, indigenous practices of her antepasados, the healing power of nature, and the

heritage of her Chicano family. In this border-crossing, the grandmother figure surfaces

as the most important bridge between the new and the old country.

While the poets of this study engage in consciousness-raising about Chicana life,

protesting against male domination, and celebrating strong brown-skinned women, visual

artists Ester Hernández, Yolanda Lopez, and Alma Lopez take an additional subversive

step by transforming the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe into an image of the

contemporary Chicana. The new interpretations depart so radically from the

conventional image of the Virgin that they provoked violent criticism, even death threats.

The artists did not expect this reaction, because they saw in Guadalupe an important

religious icon and powerful figure of liberation, but wanted to bring her closer to the

everyday experiences of all Chicanas, and empower her with female agency. In their

imaginary, the Virgin is portrayed as a karate-fighter, a hard-working seamstress, an

aging grandmother, a marathon-runner and an assertive queer woman. The fact that most

of these pictures are images of real people, including, for instance, the artist herself, her

mother, grandmother, and friends, emphasize the idea that all Chicanas are reflected in

the image of Guadalupe.

In the images of contemporary Chicanas, these artists incorporated symbols taken

from Chicano and Aztec history, for example, the flayed snake and the figure of the

Moon Goddess. Our Lady of Alma Lopez also addresses the issue of migration and her

sexual difference as a lesbian artist, through the image of the Viceroy butterfly. The

Viceroy is said to mimic the poisonous Monarch butterfly for purposes of survival, while

the Monarch is known for its genetic memory and annual migration to its region of origin

187

in Mexico. For Mexican-born Alma Lopez the butterfly’s freedom to migrate to its place

of origin carries the same weight as the birds’ flight in the borderless sky in

Cervantes’poetry. Thus, the artistic sign of the Virgin of Guadalupe is charged with

symbols of female agency, indigenous spirituality, and regenerative powers of the older

generation. Each meaning challenges the hegemony of the nation state and the Catholic

Church. The function of patriarchy is diminished by transforming the image of the small

male angel portrayed underneath the Virgin into “a middle-aged agent of patriarchy” (in

Yolanda Lopez’s work) and by presenting a bare-breasted Chicana (in Alma Lopez’s

work) as a reference to natural female beauty and the Virgin’s queer potential.

Norma Cantú’s Canícula serves as the context for multiple border-crossings and

the construction of third space identities. This ethno-biographic narrative is based on the

life of a Chicano family residing in the geographic space of Monterrey, Mexico, and San

Antonio, Texas, in the period spanning the late 1800s to 1960s. It is a story about

multiple border crossings between the two countries, some produced by the conditions of

the Mexican Revolution or by U.S. government deportation efforts, and others generated

by everyday life in South Texas. Cantú’s narrative follows a non-linear plot and includes

family snapshots whose descriptions do not always match the image. That strategy

conveys the impression that memories are malleable and that the mimetic representations

in family snapshots do not always match family members’ explanation or interpretations.

Cantú’s mixing of genres evokes the impression that Chicana/o subjectivities are multiple

and regenerated through history, family myths, and the shifting border itself. Cantú’s text

raises questions about the veracity of autobiographical writing and family narratives. The

mismatched images and details in the snapshots sometimes “prick the eye,” like Barthes’s

188

punctum, revealing new truths or giving rise to new interpretations of previously cited

facts. The blurring of boundaries produces the effect of in-between that contributes to the

reshaping of Borderlands subjectivities. The narrative itself was produced in-between

seasons, during the asearingly hot time of harvesting in Texas (Canícula xii). While

Canícula speaks to many injustices and losses, such as poverty, unemployment, rape,

dominant society’s intolerance of Mexicans and the use of Spanish language, the

Vietnam war, and the death of family members, it also draws strength from indigenous

beliefs, ancient healing practices, rituals of everyday life, and close family relationships,

especially with the grandmother. The women of Canícula are strong and capable.

Notions of body surface in the text when the narrator describes the hard work in the

agricultural fields, her own bug-bitten limbs, and the illness, rape, and death in her

community. The cultural and linguistic re-shaping of the narrator’s identity is made

possible by her border crossings as a child to visit extended family “on the other side” in

Mexico.

While Norma Alarcón’s theories about multiple subjectivities have provided a

useful theoretical framework for my investigation, it is clear that identity development is

also affected by the lived experience of race, class, gender, and location. This perhaps

receives insufficient emphasis in Alarcón’s theorizations. In Learning from Experience,

Paula Moya has provided a critique of Alarcón’s theory, arguing that her vision falls short

because she denies the concept of identity. According to Alarcón, Chicana subjectivities

are produced by multiple discourses, and remain incoherent subjects-in-process. Moya

writes: “Alarcón’s woman of color can have multiple subjectivities (in that she is

produced as a ‘subject’ by multiple discourses), but she cannot have an identity because

189

‘to grasp or reclaim an identity in this culture means always already to have become a

subject” (Moya 69). Moya argues that women of color try to work through the conflicts

they experience in order to create a better social order. She adopts the notion of politics

of transfiguration from Paul Gilroy: “Through political action oppressed people are

engaged in imagining new desires, social relations, and modes of association for

themselves and their oppressors” (qtd. in Moya 77). The politics of transfiguration

resonates with bell hooks’s views about margin and center and Freire’s concept of

concientización. Through lived experiences and a new awareness, women of color can

begin to identify linkages between socially produced categories of identity, and the

unequal distribution of power, goods and resources (Moya 77), which are situated in

specific historical locations. Moya’s notions appear relevant because they can help

mobilize a consciousness and turn incoherent subjects of discourse into active agents of

change. In raising awareness about Chicana life and offering empowering images that

reshape the narrative of Chicanas, the authors and the artists studied in this dissertation

have contributed toward the goal of opening up new possibilities for emerging Chicana

subjectivities in the Third Space and the creation of new world orders that Anzaldúa

envisions in “El Mundo Zurdo.”

190

Note

1 In this stanza, Anzaldúa refers to the negative connotation of Borderlands

dwellers in the dominant society. However in the end, they are the creators of a

new race and new world order. In an interview with Andrea Lunsford, Anzaldúa

explains her concept of burra as a Trojan Horse, the stomach of which opens up,

and “out comes the other trying to make changes from the inside” (13).

191

Appendix

Fig. 1. Traditional Image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Artist unknown.

192

Fig. 2. Ester Hernández. The Virgin of Guadalupe Defending the Rights of

Chicanos. 1975. Black and white etching. Collection of the artist.

193

Fig. 3. Yolanda Lopez. Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe. 1978. Oil

pastel on paper. Collection of the artist.

194

Fig. 4. Yolanda Lopez. Victoria F. Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe. 1978. Oil

pastel on paper. Collection of the artist.

195

Fig. 5. Yolanda Lopez. Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe. 1978. Oil

pastel on paper. Collection of the artist.

196

Fig. 6. Alma Lopez. Our Lady. 1999. Digital image. Collection of the artist.

197

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